The good folks at CIC, a research company focused on Chinese social media (full disclosure: also my internship host), have produced a stunning infographic of the social services for 10 top internet companies.
Chinese internet giants often try to be everything to everybody (mission creep, anyone?) and this infographic lays out the wide range of products they attempt.
This CIC infographic divides products into no fewer than 18 main categories:
- Open Platforms (Internet companies offering Open API not only for a single product, but also cross-product APIs)
- Group Buying
- Online Games (game center)
- Microblogging
- IM (instant messaging)
- BBS (online forum)
- Q&A (or Social Q&A like Quora)
- e-Commerce (does not include group buying sites)
- Video (sites with video uploading capability)
- Music (sites with music storage, playback and social capability)
- SNS
- Blog
- LBS
- RSS (Google Reader like RSS service)
- Lite Blog (Tumblr Clones)
- Consumer Review
- Wiki (online Wikipedia sites)
- Business Social Network (LinkedIn Clones)
China’s social internet is fragmented with multiple giants competing for dominance. Every successful product is cloned by a rival in no time, due in part to a lack of legal regulations and IP protection.
Tencent is crowned at the top of the list providing services in 17 out of 18 categories. China’s most valuable firm (Baidu) hits 14 out of 18, though one area they haven’t touched yet is SNS–will Baidu clone Google+? Or acquire another target?
And Tumblr clones has been picked up by Tencent, Sina, Renren and Shanda, yet the most successful one is Diandian, an independent startup with an extraordinary founder, which shows Chinese internet market still has potential for entrepreneurs to flourish.
One other area that’s bested by an independent startup is Social Q&A. It’s Quora outside of China, but inside the GFW it’s Zhihu.com. While Baidu Zhidao (百度知道) may be the mainstream player in terms of traffic, when it comes to high quality social Q&A, Zhihu is the leader.
Furthermore, LinkedIn-style professional social networking has yet to pick up in China. We previously interviewed Dominic Penaloza, the co-founder and CEO of Ushi.cn, a ‘Chinese LinkedIn’ on trends in the industry.
Another relatively barren realm is LBS, but it should be noted that location-based services still face significant regulation and don’t enjoy the freedom that Foursquare does in the US.
The infographic itself is mostly Chinese logos, for any inquiries please feel free to contact us, or CIC the creator of this infographic.
Let’s check in again in 6 months time to see how quickly this landscape shifts!
*Note: the sites underneath each internet giant may not be wholly-owned companies, in some cases they are investment partnerships.
Share TechRice!
Pingback: StartupDigest