Inside Look at Popular BlogChina

Last year, in the New Scientist,  Xiao Qiang, the director of the China Internet Project at the University of California at Berkeley and also the editor of China Digital News blog at chinadn.org, wrote about how the ‘blog revolution is sweeping across China. With close to 10 million blogs now on the World Wide Web and with nearly 50,000 new ones added each day, including this one, it’s no wonder that the academic and business communities continue to focus on a rising Digital China in the second half of 2005.

Recently, at Michigan State there was the Digital Silk Road Conference summarized so succinctly by blogger Rebecca MacKinnon at RConversation. The conference brought together various academics and bloggers, including BlogChina’s chief consultant, Hu Yong speaking on the subject of “Will Internet Technology Catalyze Massive Social Change in China.”

This is all newsworthy now that the company that launched China's leading blog portal plans to list on the technology stock-heavy Nasdaq exchange before the end of the year and hopes to achieve a market capitalization of more than US$1 billion. Not bad for a company that claims to be netting about $240,000 in monthly revenues.

"I expect we will even surpass Sina with our [initial public offering]," said BlogChina founder and chief executive Fang Xingdong, as he outlined plans for the next stage in the firm's meteoric growth. Mr Fang, lays claim as the individual responsible for coining the Chinese word for blog (bo-ke), and appears to be guiding BlogChina into becoming the dominant mainland weblog portal with more than two million bloggers.

BlogChina has granted interviews to other media including Beijing Business Today. In that interview, Fang stated that they will not charge basic services such as storage space and in the short run will also not charge for value added services.

I took this opportunity to get inside BlogChina’s operations to reflect the direct views of one of their own employees, a systems developer, Jiang Xiang in a series of recent e-mails. This 28 year-old female studied for a few years in the US before returning to her home in Beijing.

She reaffirmed that the average age of a BlogChina company employee is 25. When Jiang joined the company at the first of the year there were only 80 employees now there are more than 160. Jiang is most candid about the dramatic income disparity in China and says that “ the income gap is probably not as serious a problem in Beijing as found in other locales in China, where most citizens just earn enough for rent and food, but do not have any extra money to pay for blogging.”

BlogChina secured $5million in seed financing from Softbank Asia Infrastructure Fund. According to Jiang, reflecting her views rather than a formal company statement release; she claims that BlogChina has many value-added products from online bookmark services to RSS reader and a traditional online forum. 

As a developer, Jiang’s job is directly related to immediate feedback from the blog’s readers. In a recent e-mail to me, she wrote. “Because the development job is directly related with the feedback, we also face to lots of critics everyday.”

She also cited that “Blogchina has a very large news website which collects good articles from other sites and also hosts various kinds of small group talks and other activities for everyone  (not  only the bloggers).”  Despite an unproven business model, BlogChina remains very much in business. The BlogChina team generates advertising on their popular site and has no present issues with the government’s on again and off again censorship policies. This is newsworthy given the recent moves by China to tighten control over the Internet. See this recent article on Internet censorship.
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About six months ago, I posted this response to Rebecca MacKinnon’s blog. These feelings and my observations remain buoyant about Chinese technocrats like Issac Mao who possess a strong social conscience and are using their blogs to educate and generate support for change.

Unfortunately, just last month, China once again tightened policing of the Internet. The latest draconian measures requires bloggers and owners of personal Web sites to register with government or be shut down.