Re: Top Sites in Asia

From: Yat Siu <ysiu_at_outblaze.com>
Date: Wed 19 Jan 2000 04:28:27 +0800

TB BOEY WROTE:
> I am responsible for internet marketing for an American
> IT company specifically targeting just the Asia Pacific
> region. Does anyone know where I can get statistics and
> ratings on the top websites in Asia that are visited
> mainly by surfers from Asia?

TO WHICH SHRIRAM CHAUBAL REPLIED:
> The asian market is fairly segemented. This is due to
> language and cultural differences. To get a good
> sampling of sites, you will have to look at the
> Chinese, Japanese, Korean, South East Asian (primarily
> English covering Singapore, Malaysia, Phillipines and
> perhaps Indonesia), Thai and Indian subcontinental
> sites.

Shiram,

for starters there is a general "lack" of understanding
as a whole when defining "surfers from asia". Asians
don't think in terms of asia, but in terms of country.
A Pan-asian portal is not going to work for asian
viewers, but it will work great for perhaps a foreign
audience wishing to go into Asia (say a travel guide,
or an information resources...or so)

Asia is far too multi-cultural that you could create a
portal for "asian" viewers as a whole, alone the
language diversity is just too big. Altough English is
accepted as the "Internet language", there are only a
few countries that have high english literacy.

Once you get into the country portals you will find
that they are all very specific in their language, and
very popular.

Example, sina.com is one of the leading China portals,
the site is all in Chinese (GB or Big5). Japan, well
Yahoo Japan is quite big there, but it's also followed
by the telco portals from eg. NTT. U.S. portals like
CNN are not that popular, but some of the localized
versions like Yahoo Japan are (however, Yahoo "asia"
based out of Singapore has yet to make a dent in the
market from what I understand). This however changes in
an Indian market for instance where local networking
topology does not exist (yet that is, there is a push
for multiple IX's) so visiting U.S. websites is just as
fast too. That is why most Indian portals are hosted
out of a U.S. data ctr., but if you look at China,
Korea etc. they are all hosted in-country IX and in the
local language.

Goldman Sachs makes some very good research reports out
there on asian growth and asian internet companies, you
should check them out in terms of research and what
they have. Growth in asia these days is just
phenomenal.

Regards,

Yat

http://www.outblaze.com





Received on Tue Jan 18 2000 - 14:28:27 CST