Having overtaken the US as the world’s biggest online population last year, China now has just shy of 300 million users (see page 14 for further details).
The release of the data provides a perfect opportunity for Western media to run another ‘look how many people there are in China’ story - a reflection of the insecurity felt in the West as much as mere statistical curiosity.
The release of the data provides a perfect opportunity for Western media to run another ‘look how many people there are in China’ story - a reflection of the insecurity felt in the West as much as mere statistical curiosity.
Of course, the numbers involved can be mind-boggling, not least for marketers operating in the market. Coke’s latest online campaign, based around sending e-cards for Chinese New Year, racked up 72 million visitors (more than the entire population of the UK) in two weeks.
But the headline numbers are increasingly becoming the least interesting aspect of China’s internet scene. For marketers, the devil, as they say, is in the detail (and kudos to Edelman’s Adam Schokora for translating these statistics for non-Chinese speakers).
In case there were any doubt, the report confirms that the web is overwhelmingly a young person’s medium - 67 per cent of China’s netizens are under 30, compared with 43 per cent of the country’s total population. No surprise there, perhaps; young people all over the world have been first to take to the web. But what does raise eyebrows is the news that China’s web population is actually getting younger - in the past year, the proportion of users aged 10 to 19 has risen from 28 per cent to 35 per cent; those aged 20 to 29 have fallen from 38 per cent to 32 per cent.
There’s also confirmation of the incredible popularity of instant messaging (75 per cent use it) and gaming (63 per cent) - compare that with the figure for social networks, just 19 per cent. And another major feature of the Chinese web, internet cafés, is also evident - 42 per cent access the net from these locations, compared with 21 per cent for the workplace.
So what does all this mean for the internet as an advertising medium? Arguably, it shows that it is still a very long way from being a mass medium. That sounds ridiculous, given the numbers involved, but the medium has yet to ‘settle down’ in the way it did in the West. Penetration is rising, but if the statistics are right most new users must still be kids or twentysomethings. The ‘silver surfer’ remains a tiny minority. China’s internet population remains young, fickle and, frankly, not very well off (43 per cent make less than Rmb 1,000 per month).
The internet in China undoubtedly offers marketers an unparalleled opportunity to target young consumers and, as Coke has shown, there are very real opportunities to engage with them. The question now is, when will it be in a position to offer anything else?
