Xiaonei and 51.com: Merging Web 2.0 with games
- Source: Global Times
- [09:37 July 20 2009]
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By Sherman So and J. Christopher Westland
Editor’s note:
This article has been adapted from Red Wired: China’s Internet Revolution co-authored by Sherman So and J. Christopher Westland. The to-be-published book is aimed at helping readers gain a firsthand understanding of how the Chinese combined successful components from their Western counterparts with innovation, to accommodate the unique characteristics of the Chinese market.
Last week, we talked about the development of video-sharing sites in China – how they changed the Youtube formula to become more successful in the country. This week, we look at another major category of the Web 2.0 sites – social networking.
Chinese entrepreneurs also made their own tweaks to western social networking sites. Xiaonei and 51.com, the Chinese answers to Facebook and Myspace respectively, realized that merging social networking sites with online games could be a formula for success.
Social networking sites became popular in China in 2005. Two of the most popular are 51.com and Xiaonei. They were the second and the third most popular blogs in China, according to a 2007 survey sponsored by Baidu, the leading search engine. The champion was Tencent’s Qzone, which generated the most traffic among blogs in China.
Beijing-based Xiaonei was founded by students at Tsinghua University and Tingjing University 1 in December 2005. Entrepreneur Joe Chen bought it in October 2006 and built it into the largest alumni sites for university students in China.
“My first venture was ChinaRen. I sometimes call it the Web 1.0 version of Facebook,” said Chen. He founded ChinaRen, a community site for Chinese university students, together with his MBA Stanford classmates Nick Yang and Zhou Yunfan in 1999.
ChinaRen was then sold to Sohu, the second-largest online portal in China, for $33 million after the Internet bubble burst in 2000. After a brief spell at Sohu, Chen went to the US, where he made an ill-fated effort to start an optical networking company. With the industry reeling from the bubble bursting and the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks 2, his timing could not have been worse.
Chen returned to China to set up another company, Oak Pacific, in November 2002. With the backing of a group of venture capitalists, he tried all kinds of Internet businesses. In 2004, he acquired Mop.com and developed it into an online community focused on entertainment. The next year, he bought DoNews, a tech-blogging site.
1 They are Wang Xing , Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang and Tang Yang.
2 BusinessWeek, “China Web 2.0: Joe Chen Wants it All”, March 21, 2007, Bruce Einhorn.