Monday, June 16, 2014

Brief Introduction of Chinese Social Networks

China has 618 million Internet users as of Jan. 2014. 91% of the online population has a social media account. 


There are five major social networks in China. Namely, they are Sina Weibo, RENREN, Tencent Weibo, Qzone, and WeChat. Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo are more Twitter equivalents. Renren and Qzone are Facebook equivalents. WeChat is WhatsApp equivalent.



Let’s turn our attention to one of the social networks that resembles Facebook, RENREN. The main business of RENREN is it main social networking website renren.com, the game development and operating platform, Renren Games, and the user-generated content focused video sharing website 56.com.

Renren has an accumulated activated users of 210 million as of March 31, 2014. Its monthly unique log-in users is 51 million as of March 2014.

Its revenue comes from banner advertising, virtual currency, special VIP services, public pages, social network games, paid survey service, instant messaging, recruiting platform, and shopping platform, with its main revenue comes from pay-for-time banner advertising.

As a matter of fact, 42% of the revenue of renren.com comes from advertising on its pages. However,  most of these revenue is contributed by several major companies. In 2010, 248 advertisement contributed the 94% of the 42% of the total revenue of renren.com. The revenue is based on the time of the advertisement on the webpages, not on CPM. This kind of business model means that the companies that advertise on renren.com is acquired by the advertising sales representatives. This easily help the sales representatives to manually choose the right clients.

Sources:
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-quick-guide-to-chinas-social-networks-2013-10

                              


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