China's Great Firewall Fails to Halt Growth of Blogs

Filed in archive Innovation on August 6, 2006

CVN has learned that Netease (Nasdaq: NTES) will soon launch a blog service at blog.163.com. Pacific Epoch confirms that Netease has invited 5,000 users to participate in closed beta test of the service. Chinese Internet portals Sina and Sohu both have active blog services, and Tencent's QQ portal has a personal space service.

This Middle Kingdom blog revolution which hopes to be monetized by its founders and many Silicon Valley VC investors, occurs as Beijing's "Great Firewall" still desperately attempts to control and to protect the nine gateways connecting China to the global internet. For an excellent overview of the history of blogs I suggest reading Xiao Qiang's Digital Times record.

The paradox is that even China's government is trying to boost public interest in its figurehead parliament and its companion advisory body by setting up Web logs for its tech-sylish Party members.

According to The Blog Herald, there are over 5 million bloggers in China and a Reuters article says China may have over 60 million bloggers by the end of 2006 and 100 million in 2007. However, a survey by the Chinese search engine Baidu places the current number of bloggers at nearly 37 million, which are maintained by 16 million young Chinese netizens.

One thing is clear, whose ever number we are using, VCs like Softbank Asia Infrastructure Fund (SAIF), granite Global Ventures (GGV), Mobius Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners have already made investments in China's largest blog service, Bokee and there's every reason to think that there will be even more investments to promote the continued rapid expansion of China's blogosphere.

CVN will continue to watch and monitor the commercialization of China's citizen journalists and also track those Silicon Valley VCs investments in this space.