Social Networks Not a Hot Destination in China

Chinese Internet users spend a quarter of their time on web portals, according to a recent ComScore report. Unlike the rest of the world, social networks aren't a primary target in China, being edged out by entertainment and even search websites.

If you needed another piece of proof the country is different from the rest of the Globe, this recent study by comScore, a world leader in measuring digital data and statistics, just shows that.

The report measured the time spent online by users in the Greater China region, an aggregate made by Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Its results shown a clear preference among Chinese users for web portals, spending 24.4% of their total online time on these kind of sites.

Leading among all web portals were sites owned by Tencent Inc. (QQ.com), amassing 64.4% of all online time spent on sites of its category.

Surprisingly, social networks weren't even in the top 3, being surpassed by entertainment sites with 9.0% and search/navigation services with 6.2%.

Among entertainment websites, the most popular were sites owned by Youku Inc. (Youku.com) with 19.2% of all time spent online on sites in its category.

Users also spent 59.4% of all their search time browsing through Baidu results, the local search engine continuing its domination over Google.

5.5% was the percentage spent by people in the Greater China region on social networking sites, significantly lower than the rest of the World.

Comparing this value with global indicators recorded by Nielsen in June 2010, social sites rack up 22.7% of the total time spent online by all Internet users. All this while the global time spent on portals last year was at a 4.4% level.

We can see that at only 5.5%, China's statistics are at levels recorded at a Global level in the early 2000s'.

As for the current main destination in social networking traffic, Xiaonei.com was the primary target, occupying 17.8% of the total social time spent online.

In the fifth position, Retail sites took up 5.0% of the time spent online by Chinese users, 36.5% of the time being on Alibaba.