Not quite search marketing, but foreign money is still inflating the Chinese market.  Massive advertising company WPP has bought into MySpace China.  Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp allowed this site to develop almost from scratch.

Google are going to go into China with cheque book open, and buying a couple of unannounced companies.  (Thanks to the Multilingual search blog for pointing this out).

Analysys International claim that the Chinese internet advertising market is still growing at a breakneck speed.  (The figures that are quoted seem to be typos.

What is hyper-speed growth?  Seeking Alpha thinks it knows.

 The most important part of China’s growth is that it is not just fast but that it is not new.  China at the moment is simply copying Western success – just being ruthlessly efficient efficient about it.  Depopulating the countryside, rewarding capital and all the other stages of the early industrial revolution.

Always remember that about China, its just doing what fifty countries have done before – just on a bigger scale and a little bit faster.  It’s when China starts acting differently then the bets are off

 Webmaster radio has put up its interview with James Spencer of ChinaSearchAds.com.

The China SEO blog lists six mistakes for Chinese websites.  In short:

• Building a flash website
• Going cheap for web design, hosting or promotion
• Inexistent or incomplete Chinese translation of your site
• Hosting Overseas
• Not registering with the Chinese government
• Over-relying on Pay-Per-Click to advertise your site

The case about Starbucks leaving the forbidden city has been portrayed as a case of Chinese cultural chauvinism or pride (although why there are so many Starbucks in China is not explained). 

What is important is that a petition of 500,000 was started on the internet against a government policy. 

There’s  a similar story about a cat rescue co-ordinated over the internet, citizen activism is a real story in at least some parts of China.  This may be a sign of greater freedom, or it may be seen as a threat to the regime.

Although the internet is by no means as free as in the West, it is still free in comparison to what people imagine the Chinese internet to be.

An interesting question has been posted on the forum about evading the great firewall:

http://chinasearchads.com/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1184969784/0

If anyone has other ideas, or other interesting questions feel free to post.

By the way I realise that there are often one or two spam articles up, but this is the price for allowing guest posting is that some people will put up spam.  When the user base grows then I will stop guests posting.  Until then just don’t buy the hoodia or nearly genuine watches.

One of the eye openers about China is the number of ethnic Chinese people who live outside China.  Some notable numbers from Wikipedia:

• The United States has 3 million Chinese, of whom 2 million claim not to speak English “very well”.
• Canada has 1.3 million ethnic Chinese – almost 4% of the population
• In Australia and New Zealand the Chinese population is around 2.5% of the total population
• France and the United Kingdom each have around 300,000 ethnic Chinese people
• Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia have a combined Chinese population of 22.8 million.  As they tend to be more wealthy than their non-Chinese neighbours, that’s quite a nice market.

That looks like quite a few valuable niches to market to.

Old but gold time again.  This time the Guardian writes about what attracts Chinese tourists to the UK, and by extension the West.