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According to data from Alibaba Group’s e-commerce and travel platforms, the game’s impact has been felt far beyond the virtual world.

Video Game Sales Skyrocket

On the day of its release, “Black Myth: Wukong” caused a significant increase in video game-related purchases on Alibaba’s Taobao platform, a major C2C e-commerce site in China, according to Alibaba’s blog Alizila.

Video game sales on Taobao surged by 130% compared to the previous week, while searches for the game title spiked nearly 14 times. The game has captured the attention of Chinese gamers with its immersive graphics and engaging storyline based on the classic Chinese novel “Journey to the West”.

The demand for gaming consoles also saw a notable increase, with PlayStation 5 (PS5) sales doubling year-on-year in the week leading up to the game’s release.

The console maintained the top spot in Tmall’s video game equipment rankings for four consecutive days, reflecting the growing enthusiasm for high-quality gaming experiences among Chinese consumers.

Tmall’s game consoles category reported an 80% year-on-year increase in sales, further underscoring the game’s influence on the market.

Additionally, Alibaba’s second-hand trading platform Xianyu experienced a 300% increase in searches for PS5 consoles in August, highlighting the widespread interest in gaming hardware.

Tourism Boom in Shanxi Province

Beyond the gaming sector, “Black Myth: Wukong” has also reignited interest in China’s rich cultural heritage, particularly in Shanxi province.

The game’s stunning visuals, inspired by Shanxi’s ancient temples, carved grottoes, and rugged mountains, have captivated players and spurred a tourism boom in the region. On Fliggy, Alibaba’s online travel platform, searches for Shanxi locations and accommodations doubled month-on-month on the day of the game’s release.

The province, home to three UNESCO World Heritage Sites and the only remaining structures from the Tang dynasty, has seen a 70% year-on-year increase in tourism bookings this summer, according to Fliggy.

This surge includes ticket orders and car rentals, indicating a broad interest in exploring the historical and cultural sites depicted in the game.

Many netizens from Beijing, as well as residents from Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Henan, have been driving searches for Shanxi destinations on Fliggy, eager to experience the real-life locations that inspired the game’s enchanting world.

Broader Implications for China’s Gaming and Tourism Sectors

The success of “Black Myth: Wukong” is a testament to the growing intersection between digital entertainment and cultural tourism in China.

As a single-player game that allows players to explore a richly detailed version of ancient China, it has not only set a new benchmark for gaming experiences but also sparked renewed interest in the country’s cultural heritage.

The game’s impact on both the gaming and tourism sectors demonstrates the potential for digital media to drive real-world economic activity.

According to a survey by gaming industry consultancy Niko Partners, 62% of PC gamers in China reported spending more in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period last year, reflecting a broader trend of increased investment in gaming.

As “Black Myth: Wukong” continues to captivate players around the world, its influence on consumer behavior in China is likely to grow, offering a unique example of how digital entertainment can transcend screens and inspire real-world exploration and spending.

This trend could lead to further integration of cultural themes in video games and potentially more collaborations between the gaming industry and tourism sectors to leverage the storytelling power of games to promote travel and cultural appreciation.

How does Tencent make billions from its membership? Today we will discover the membership secret of Tencent’s money machine.

Establish QQ Membership Hierarchy System

When Tencent established membership system, the key point was to charge members. How can Tencent make members continue to pay for QQ services? Tencent came up with membership hierarchy system, to make members sense the identity difference. Tencent has built 7 levels of hierarchy membership system, each of which enjoys different privileges.

For example, if you are VIP1, growing to VIP2 need 600 credits. Suppose daily credit is 5, then you need 120 days to grow to VIP2, which means four months membership fees. Tencent said a good membership hierarchy system should satisfy the basic need of customers, give users expectations and increase the cost of leaving. The main features of Tencent membership system are the identity difference and expectations.

In order to make it work, the difference between levels has to be big enough to arouse motivation for users to upgrade. Besides, the upgrade speed has to slow down as the level goes up. For example, upgrading from VIP1 to VIP2 takes 600 credits, and upgrading from VIP2 to VIP3 takes 1200 extra credits. In this way, the hierarchy system forms a pyramid structure. Designers have to make the user distribution in different levels suitable, not letting users to get to another level too fast, otherwise it would be difficult to maintain the users in a single level. What’s more, the top level has to be extremely hard to get and rare, attractive, becoming the pursuit of all users.

Last but not least, Tencent has to create new top level in the appropriate time to sustain the growth of users, give them expectations.” When the number of top level users is close to the second high level, it is time to create a new top level,” said by the membership product manger Mr. Liu in Tencent.

To set up a membership hierarchy is not difficult, what’s difficult is to maintain the system. Tencent reminds VIP members at all possible occasions of their levels, upgrade speed and goals to achieve. For example, when a member upgrade to a higher level, Tencent would send an email explaining all the privileges enjoyed by this level users.

Tencent motivates members by specified numbers, like ranking, to make them sense accomplishment. It is crucial to keep the hierarchy equal to every member, nobody can jump to next level.

Knowing the Need of Customers, Improving Customer Segmentation

In 2011, Tencent found some people sold QQ VIP membership symbol for 1 yuan (USD 0.16), and what’s astonishing was about 3 million users bought this service. Instead of warning the illegal sellers and punishing users who bought the service by cancelling their membership symbols, Tencent sent messages to these 3 million users and gave them 20% off for VIP membership. 15% of these users turned QQ VIP members.

Another example was the design of membership fee notification. Tencent designed two proposals, and tested them together in different groups of users, finally decided to adopt one according to the reaction of users.

Because Tencent has a large user database, so most of decisions are based on data analysis, and Tencent could target different groups of users to achieve customer segmentation. Membership management has built up a model of the existing members, new members and lost members.

A study, conducted by researchers at Hong Kong University, studied a random sample of roughly 30,000 users and found that 57% had no posts in the timeline, 86.9% of users wrote no original posts and 88.9% did not repost any original message from another account.

Sina claimed Weibo reached 503 million registered users by the end of 2012; applying this 57% figure from the study, it left with 220 million users have ever posted anything on Sina Weibo. The study’s findings also suggest that only around 30 million users will write a unique post in a given week. (According to Sina, Weibo had 46.2 million daily active users.)

According to the study, only 0.5% of users posted more than 20 messages over the seven-day study period, and another 0.5% reposted more than 40 unique messages during the time.

Another interesting finding from the study is that Beijing, Shanghai, and the province of Guangdong, which account for 9% of China’s Internet population, were home to more than a quarter of the 12,000 Weibo users they studied.

via WSJ

Baidu Zhidao is the world’s largest Chinese interactive Q&A community platform. Recently it launched Q&A community marketing platform for enterprises.

Baidu Zhidao Enterprise Platform serves as corporations’ official customer service. The platform is offered for the enterprise users to communicate with their customers and lightens the burden of the high labour service cost, which can also help companies manage customer relations.

The platform is regarded as the customer service innovations on the Internet which builds a bridge of communication for the enterprise and the consumer users, in order to achieve efficient interaction between the two.

Baidu Zhidao Enterprise Platform offers both powerful precise marketing and market data monitoring functions for the corporations. It is set up to help promote the enterprise brands and supervise the quality and the satisfaction of the customer service. This to a great extent helps corporations save the costs of both labour cost and advertising.

You can send an e-mail to qiyepingtai@baidu.com to apply for the corporation with Baidu if necessary. Directly dialing 010-59924485/8632 to contact Baidu is also welcome.

Following the global trend of smart TVs’ popularity, 40% of the TVs that shipped in China in Q2 were web-enabled. According to NPD’s October 2012 DisplaySearch “Quarterly Smart TV Shipment and Forecast Report”, “this was an increase from 26% of televisions shipped in Q2 2011”.

This increase is quite reasonable. Firstly, most TV users are spoiled netizens and are very tired of TV shows’ schedule. Secondly, online content are ready to meet the need of smart TV users. It seems that UGC could be transferred from online videos to TV series.

The market scale of weibo will be about 500 million yuan (USD79.82 million) in 2012, among which ads and games represent 75.6% and 21.9% respectively, according to iResearch.

During the second quarter reports, Sina weibo announced its revenue in advertising, accounting for USD 10 million. At this moment, all players are searching for better business model to fit their own characteristics.

Xunlei.com and PPLive ranked 6^th and 7^th following the list respectively.

“The past year has been marked by an explosion in the cost of licensed TV series and movie content, license fee of a Chinese series drama hit almost USD 100, 000 per episode”, according to Tech in Asia said so. But many online video producers such as Youku.com announced in the financial report that this year’s content cost dropped. We can anticipate that the fierce competition for hot TV series has become something of the past.

Source: Tech in Asia

According to GlobalWebIndex, emerging internet markets dominate growth numbers for the big name social services and the top five markets for owning and being active on social profiles are Indonesia, China, South Korea, Philippines and Russia.

The same study reported 35.5 million active Twitter users (those who used or contributed to the platform at least once a month using any device) in China.

Shen Xiangyang, Microsoft’s Senior Vice President, Director of Search Engine, disclosed Bing Search’s strategy in China recently.

He said, in order to acquire the 5% high value English search queries, Bing will implement differential competitive strategy in the short run. The core is to provide users with better English search services, including translation and online dictionary.

Though mobile searches still have some limitations compared with that on PC, no one will ignore the potential of it considering the high growth of mobile internet’s development. Shen also points out that Microsoft regard mobile search as the key point for Bing to hit the search market.

Currently, Bing Chinese Search launches a new version, adding some functions like dynamic home page. As for the wireless field, it supplies Window phone with some services like one-touch search.

Instead of giving comments for the 3B War between Baidu and 360, Shen shared Bing’s development in China and the U.S. “In America, Bing has deep cooperation with leading SNS platforms, Facebook and Twitter. Users can directly use Bing once log in on Facebook. Bing is the only search engine cooperated with Twitter.”

Recently, a new form of ad is formally launched on Sina Weibo. This social ads enable weibo posts to reach ALL followers rather than being buried; this is like Facebook Promote. The promoted posts will appear as the first on users’ weibo home page after logging in. The post will sink as more posts get published and appear on the timeline. Each user will only see one promoted post within 24 hours.

Sina had selected some advertisers to test this advertising form. The characters of “From Weibo Promote” will turn up at the bottom left of the promoted post. There is no limitation on the quantity of marketers’ weibo posts. BMW China and Ctrip have used this advertising form.

With more than 2 billion weibo users, this new advertising form is very promising. Let’s take a look at how it works and how it charges.

This new ad format will charge advertisers based on the total impressions delivered. Every impression costs 0.1 yuan.  Marketers can set the total number of impression to deliver. Reports on performance will also be available on total number of re-post, total comments, clicks and exposure.

Tencent launched an apps search engine for Android, “Haina“. It also includes a page for a list of the top android apps.

Smartphone shipments in China grew 164% year over year to 33.1 million units in the June quarter, topping the 25 million units sold in the U.S. according to Needham & Company.

Recently Baidu PPC accounts become the target of hackers; if your company runs paid search on Baidu, make sure your account is safe and what to do next if it’s hacked.

It’s time to check with your account manager or consultant if any of the following happens:

• Account suspended due to “illegal” keywords and/or ad copies (delete them if you find)
• New keywords are added (e.g. “taobao” related shopping keywords)
• Sudden change in daily spend levels

Use alert feature to remind yourself when the account hits a specified daily budget; also, do set a strong password. Don’t forget to claim a refund if someone used your PPC fund.

Some of you keeping an eye on Chinese social media probably know Sina Weibo has launched VIP membership feature this week, opening a channel for revenue on Weibo.

VIP Membership have six levels while all start at Level 1 (VIP1) at 10 yuan a month or 108 yuan for annual payment. As the member logins more often, the level will go up.

VIP members get four types of privileges: status showoff, extra functions, mobile and security features.

Status Showoff on Weibo

VIP members will have a VIP icon beside their username (top right image), premium templates to choose from to decorate their homepage, VIP badges (image above), unique ID (Weihao, or micro-number), and dedicated customer service.

Extra Functions

Extra functions VIP members get include:

• Accelerated growth of Weibo Levels (normal user grows to a higher level by accumulating more login hours)
• Increased limit of maximum number of users one can follow (non-VIP can follow up to 2,000 users on Sina Weibo); VIP1-VIP3 can follow up to 2,500 users and VIP4-VIP6 up to 3,000
• Higher priority to be recommended to other users
• Increased limit of maximum number of users one can “quietly” follow (currently any user can follow up to 10 users without being found) to 15 for VIP1-3, 20 for VIP 4-5 and 30 for VIP6
• Increased limit of maximum number of users one can “block” from showing his or her posts on timeline (normal member can “block” up to 5″) to 50 for VIP1-3, 80 for VIP 4-5 and 100 for VIP6

VIP Only Mobile Features

VIP Sina Weibo members can use voice posting to Weibo account by dialing 950 138 333 on mobile, receive SMS alerts when specified user logs in and followed users’ birthdays arrive.

Security Privileges

VIPs will receive security alert via SMS, probably when things like login at unusual location takes place.

The growing usage of social networks is generating business opportunities across many industries. As the country’s labor market is experiencing a fierce war on talent, we as an advertising agency specialized in employer branding and recruitment marketing, wonder how social media is playing a role in the industry.

To gain understanding on social recruitment in China, MXMM has conducted a first-ever study on the use and perception of social media among the country’s HR professionals. The results derived from this study show that 51% of the respondents already use social media for employer branding and recruitment purposes.

The most used channels in 2011 were Renren and Sina Weibo mainly because of their user demographics. The infographic below shows our key findings of ‘The 2011 China Social Network Employer Branding and Recruitment Survey’.

As with online recruitment in Western countries, there is a similar trend occurring in China with social media ranking fifth as the most used channel for employer branding and recruitment. The time of print media as newspapers and magazines seems to have passed, as the majority of our respondents perceive these channels as the least important ones for near future investment. However, some HR professionals still remain cautious as they indicate the main reason not to use social recruitment is due to their lack of knowledge within the organization and proven best practice cases on social recruitment in China.

As the penetration rate of internet usage continues to grow, we see many opportunities for this industry to further develop social strategies for recruitment and employer branding. To keep updated on the latest status on social recruitment, MXMM is conducting an on-going research study that looks into the broad (social) media landscape in China. Every year, MXMM will be publishing a report on the use and perception on (social) media according to HR-professionals in China. Keep an eye on http://socialrecruitmentchina.com and follow us on Weibo (SocialRecruitmentChina) or Twitter (SRChina) for more information on upcoming studies.

About the author

Jidi Guo started her career at employer branding and recruitment advertising agency MXMM in Shanghai after graduating with a Master’s in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. “The China Social Network Employer Branding and Recruitment Survey” is one of her current ongoing projects. Email jidi.guo at mxmm.cn

7.7% of clicks on Sina Weibo shortened links went to Taobao last month, followed by Tudou, YouKu and Baidu.

Correction: the 7th from the left should be “Soufun.com”, a property portal.

Tencent QQ, Alibaba’s Wangwang, and China Mobile’s Fetion (Feixin) were the top three most popular instant messengers in China last year.

Weixin, launched by Tencent on January 21 2011 as a iPhone App, is a free mobile communication tool. You can send voice, video, photo and text messages on Weixin, do group chatting, and find people nearby according to location data.

If you are familiar with Talkbox or Whatsapp, you roughly know how Weixin works; it now works on iOS, Android? Windows Mobile and Symbian devices.

Users can login to Weixin with their QQ ID or sign up with phone number or email address.

Tencent CEO Pony Ma announced on Tencent Weibo that total number of Weixin users has reached 100 million milestone. Tencent is also internally testing a related product called Weiyun, which works in a similar way as iCloud.

Weixin had about 50 million users in 2011 which doubled in less than three months’ time. If this trend continues, it might reach 200 million users by the end of this year. And, the growth of Weixin is very important for Tencent as many of its products find it hard to reach high end users.

CIC, a social business intelligence provider in China, shared a research finding about source credibility of online word-of-mouth in China, conducted with Yicai; it revealed that user review and recommendation websites like dianping.com are the most credible source for online WOM in China.

It’s time to re-evaluate your Baidu SEO strategy.

Called the Baidu-I²R Research Center (BIRC), the joint laboratory by Baidu and I²R (Institute for Infocomm Research, a research institute of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, or A*STAR) will operate as an R&D unit at the Fusionopolis research complex in Singapore.

The launch of BRIC showed Baidu’s commitment to enhance its products in Southeast Asia. Initially, the lab will focus on foundational Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies for Southeast Asian languages, such as Vietnamese and Thai.

via A*STAR

Group M, Youku and research company Sinomonitor jointly released a research report “Online Video Audience & Media Value” last December; the report showed that instant messager, Weibo and social networks are the top three channels China internet users share online videos.

Other key findings of this report include:

• Time spent on TV drops as online video viewing increases, particularly for those born after-1980, where TV viewing time has dropped 63.3% and viewing frequency 56.4% after using online video sites
• Online video sites complement TV in the areas of viewers, viewing times, and content; the average video viewer watches 3 hours per day, almost twice as much as TV
• Online video viewers showed higher brand awareness, deeper product understanding, higher preference and intention to purchase

Online video presents a huge opportunity for marketers and is becoming a channel marketers targeting Generation Y should not ignore, especially after China ordered a ban on advertisements during TV dramas as part of its reform of cultural activities last November.

However, Chinese banks will benefit from this attack as China Ministry of Public Security now requires that leading search engine companies show the links of five state-owned banks at the top of every search page.

This means no matter how unfriendly the sites of banks are to the search engines, they will be shown on the top of search results page of the top ten Chinese search engines.

Baidu officially released its Open Beta Test Platform last Tuesday, a convenient “one-stop shop” for users interested in participating the latest Baidu products testing.

Upon signing in, users will discover a personal center, a mission assignment square, an on-the-spot survey column, a gifts center, and an accomplishment column. Users can click on the button “receive mission” to begin testing the product right away. New users can find newbie instruction guides and detailed information on the user points accumulation system under the Platform Strategy column, and begin maneuvering effortlessly through the platform in no time.

Internet users can detect bugs, participate in research surveys and take part in various other platform survey functions to win cash prizes, mobile hard disk drives, mobile top-up cards, and Apple products. Hardcore Baidu fans can also choose to redeem points accumulated through participation for Baidu memorabilia such as Baidu mugs and Baidu shoulder bags.

Some of the products and upgrades currently available for testing include Baidu Mobile Map, Baidu Search,  English labeling function and synonyms labeling function.

Baidu Open Beta Test Platform will certainly help in Baidu’s product development process and  the Chinese IT industry as other leading IT companies may follow and launch similar platforms.

Starcom MediaVest Group’s recently conducted a study of users ages 13 to 45 in China and found that internet users aged 19 to 30 spent almost twice as much time online as watching TV.

Watching videos on computers is the most popular, which accounted for the most time spent by Chinese users except for those in Tier 1 cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou) where mobile devices are the most popular platform for video watching.

Clearly from this Starcom study, China internet users spend more time watching video on their mobile devices and computers than on TV. And, as advertising in TV dramas is banned in China, online video advertising and marketing presents a big opportunity.

A screenshot was leaked yesterday about a new social network, Laiwang.com that Alibaba is building and testing internally:

Referring to the leaked screen capture of Laiwang.com, it looks like Google+. It has also developed an Android app and iPhone App will come soon.

Renren last week announced its unaudited Q3 financial results, who also made their first post-IPO strategic acquisition, 56.com in Q3, a leading Chinese user-generated-content focused video sharing site

Renren’s mobile penetration has reached over 35% of unique monthly log-in users with over half of their mobile users accessing their Renren accounts through smartphones. In addition, Renren’s LBS commercial platform is now running 30,000 promotions and deals from thousands of merchants.

The number of Renren’s activated users increased from about 103 million a year ago to about 137 million as of September 30, 2011. Monthly unique log-in users increased from approximately 24 million to 38 million.

The “hotline box” is triggered when users conduct a search on Baidu for customer service phone number. Users can then dial the number displayed on the phone or click on the “phone icon” to find out more on Dell’s website.

How to Submit Customer Service Hotline to Baidu

To get your customer service number indexed,

• You must own the company or could represent it
• Company or website name must be uniquely identifiable; it can’t be ambiguous
• The website you submit must have a contact us page
• You must have a unified national telephone number if your business has multiple branches

To submit your information, you must have a Baidu account

1. Login with Baidu account (register here if you don’t have one)
2. Add new resources > customer service
3. Fill in contact information including keyword, customer service phone number, company name and destination URL; you can add multiple phones
4. Specify an expiry date (or never expire)
5. Submit (pending approval)

Companies with large amount of customer service phone data can submit XML file as well.

You must have a Baidu Stats account to use this service though you don’t necessarily have to install any code on the check you want to check loading performance with this tool.

The test results show the page loading speed in seconds, compared with other sites. You will get an idea about the percentage of sites that are faster than yours.

This tool even provides recommendations on what you can do to improve the page loading speed.