China has the largest Internet community in the world with over 420 million users, and has shown steady double-digit user growth rates over the past five years. However, this is only 32% of China’s total population of 1.3 billion, leaving a huge opportunity for growth in the Chinese Internet space, as reported by Penn Olson.
According to Nielsen, more than half of all online Chinese Internet users regularly blog and use social media to voice their opinions, many through Renren (the ‘Facebook for China,’ with over 120 million users) and through Sina Weibo, China’s largest micro-blogging site.
The overwhelming majority of Chinese online users—about three-fourths—use a desktop as the preferred Internet device, but China is the largest mobile device market, with over 755 million mobile subscribers. More than half of these subscribers access the Internet through their mobile devices.
Time spent online has grown to reach an average of almost 20 hours per week, with digital entertainment taking up the most time, followed by information acquisition. 82.5% of users seek access to music online, making it the top online activity – Penn Olson reports that China’s largest search engine, Baidu, even has a section specifically for online music search.
