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As blogging blooms, firms aim to cash in
Blogging is blooming in China as the country's vast pool of Web users clamor to make their mark online and ambitious local start-ups battle foreign heavyweights for a piece of the market, the Reuters reported. China now boasts a 14.2 million-strong "blogosphere," with a new blog -- a form of online diary whose name is a shortened form of personal "Web log" -- created every second, according to Web site Technorati. The growing stable of e-scribes, still small by global standards, has attracted homegrown firms and foreign giants like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo Inc. offering blogging Web pages to outspoken Chinese Internet users. The medium has already produced at least one celebrity of sorts, a woman who goes by the blog name Furong Jiejie, whose steamy online entries include passages like: "I have a physique that gives men nosebleeds." "Users don't care too much if the blog company is foreign or local, but I think local companies have more understanding of the community," said Kevin Wen, a spokesman for Beijing-based start-up Bokee.com, whose name is Chinese for blog. Bokee, formerly called BlogChina, has attracted 5 million yuan (US$616,523) in seed funding as well as $10 million in venture capital funding from six U.S. and Chinese firms. It hopes to become the first Chinese blogging company to list on the Nasdaq, Chief Executive Officer Fang Xingdong said, adding the company expects its revenue to grow to five times its August level by the end of this year and its user base to reach the 10 million mark. Rivals Blogbus.com and BlogCN.com have also said that they were in financing discussions with venture capital firms. Chinese technology IPOs have proven popular so far, with Web search company Baidu.com Inc. being the latest to strike gold with its shares more than quadrupling in value in their U.S. market debut last week. China is the world's second-largest Internet market after the United States with 120 million users forecast by year-end. But the number of bloggers is still relatively small at about 6 million, according to various sources. Microsoft says over 1 million users in China have joined its "MSN Spaces" service so far, which is operated out of China and was launched in the country just three months ago. That number is growing an average rate of 30 percent a month, said Sally Ip, MSN Asia's regional trade marketing manager. Bokee, which was set up in 2002, claims the biggest share of China's blogging market with about 2 million registered users, and said it is adding 6,000-10,000 daily. Since blogging services are usually free, companies make most of their revenue from advertising. Bokee's Wen said he might begin to charge for blogging services at the end of this year, but still saw most of the company's revenue coming from advertising and wireless charges. Bokee's site carries ads from the likes of Dell, Nokia, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, although the firm declined to say how much revenue it generates.
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