Live from Beijing!

For those of us old enough to remember The Well and CompuServe Forums, the term “BBS” evokes memories of dial-up modems and “threads” that were pretty geeky.  AOL changed the game, bringing millions of sex-seeking or otherwise-bored adults and kids online for inane chatter.  As a result, in the United States the BBS has been effectively dead since about 1997 (although it still exists in highly-refined formats, such as Slashdot.org, which I happen to love.  Yes, I’m still a geek at heart).

In contrast, the good old-fashioned BBS is alive and well in China.  In fact, almost every successful B2 C website in China I know is literally built around its BBS, which typically accounts for more than half of the traffic, and almost all of the perceived value of the website.  The user interface is very old-fashioned, complete with your choice of flat or threaded views.  There are some interesting functionality tweaks that play a critical role, primarily related to fast navigation and how community trust is earned over time by prolific posters.  But despite these interesting small innovations, any Internet veteran from the US will instantly recognize a Chinese BBS, even if he or she can’t read it.

I can’t overstate the importance of a website’s BBS to Chinese Internet users.  Time and again, through informal conversations and more formal online polling, I have confirmed that an active, well moderated BBS is far more valuable than professionally-developed content.  In every subject area imaginable, from the latest news, to having a baby, to decorating a house, to raising your children, the advice and comments of presumably-ordinary people literally power the traffic and interaction within the Chinese internet.  Every major successful Chinese B2C website I know began as a BBS.

These BBS are not just frequented by young and/or bored consumers.  The most popular website for electronics design engineers (21ic.com) is, essentially, a huge BBS.  So is the most popular website for home purchasing and renovation (soufun.com).  In fact, the advice I now give to anyone interested in entering or investing in China’s internet market is to first find the most popular BBSs in the given category and study them carefully.

I think there are two major reasons why Chinese BBS are so popular.  For clear historical reasons, the official Chinese media has not always been a reliable source of information.  Instead, consumers rely on word-of-mouth, and consider the opinions of strangers more credible than those of “professional” journalists.  This bias against journalists extends to those who work for foreign news outlets, which are presumed to be heavily biased and corrupt, since that is the starting assumption in China.

The irony (or tragedy, depending on your perspective) is that most Chinese BBS are enormously corrupt.  Since the BBS is so critical to a website’s success in China, many companies hire employees to post fake messages, typically using many different usernames, in order to “catalyze” the BBS.  In parallel, since using a BBS is so central to Chinese Internet life, many companies also hire people to masquerade as consumers, posting messages that praise their products and/or criticize competitors.  Finally, at the center of it all are the BBS moderators, who will typically require a small cash payment or “gift” in return for letting you post a link for commercial benefit or for making your topic more popular (usually by changing its color, adding stars, and moving it to the top of the list).  Since most BBS moderators are volunteers, the websites who “host” them typically turn a blind eye to this behavior.  So, the irony is that Chinese BBS are no less corrupt than other forms of media; perniciously, BBS corruption is perhaps much less obvious.

The second reason I think that Chinese BBS are so popular is that they offer a safe, easy form of personal expression and interaction.  It is still the case that you can post to a BBS anonymously (you need to register, but there is no centralized identity check similar to that used in South Korea).  This creates the impression that posting to a BBS is safe, because your fellow readers, and interested authorities, won’t be able to track you down in real life.  In addition, posting to a BBS is really easy.  Most comments are less than 50 characters long, which is the equivalent of dashing off a sentence or two.  In contrast, preparing a blog entry requires a lot of work, as does commenting thoughtfully on someone’s blog entry.  Finally, in an active BBS you are almost always guaranteed to elicit a response within the same day, no matter what you have to say; in a society that is strongly hierarchical and tight lipped, the freewheeling, almost-instant interaction of a BBS is exciting and fun.

So what does all this mean to someone interested in entering or investing in the Chinese Internet?  Of course, the answer depends on who you are:

• If you want to build a website in China, start by building a great BBS with a passionate community.  If you can do that, you’re 80% of the way there.  Along the way, discount heavily any notion that “more professional” content will have stronger appeal or credibility.
• If you’re looking for unexploited Internet needs in China, consider these: despite their enormous popularity, there is still no reliable way to search a Chinese BBS, filter for high-value comments, aggregate useful comments across categories or websites, easily identify the “honeybees” who are essential for a viable online community, or deliver a BBS effectively to a mobile device.  If you know of companies pursuing these opportunities, I’d love to hear about them!
• If you are a social scientist, journalist, or anyone else trying to get a read on the zeitgeist of the educated, urban Chinese populace, ask your team to spend hours trolling inside the popular Chinese BBSs.  Of course, also check out high traffic blogs, but they are typically less interactive.  For a read on “what’s hot”, look no further than the simple listings at the top of every BBS, which count the number of “views” and “replies” for each topic.
• If you’re looking to invest in a Chinese B2C website, be sure to ask the executives for a detailed walk-through of their BBS, and for the lessons they have learned from it.  Most Chinese entrepreneurs have learned not to talk about their BBS to foreign investors, since they typically get shrugs or eye rolls in response.  This is the investor’s mistake, since not only is the BBS usually the core value, but it is also sometimes a useful litmus tests to uncover the extent to which entrepreneurs are honest about business practices that would be considered at least shady and possibly corrupt in the West (such as “seeding” the BBS to “catalyze” growth of it).

Bottom line: in the Chinese internet, BBS is at the core.  That’s unusual, and very interesting.