SEOmoz’s article by shor provides a nicely laid-out way to understand the potential for China’s Internet population, however, it misses the point completely for today’s entrepreneurs (future-wise, learn Chinese and 好好学习!).

As the article stated, recently the number of Chinese online has surpassed the number in the US, making China the country with the most number of people online, yet with only a 20% Internet penetration rate. The missing points that should have been more strongly stressed? Many of those prefer going online for QQ–chatting (which I have been hearing a lot in the metro and wish BART could get to work underground) and mainly on their cell phone. mainly on their cell phone or on their computer playing games.

So the real central point that’s missing? Even though you have millions of people online, they are online for chatting on their cell phone which means few people are actually there to buy online–a larger concern for companies in my opinion that wish to make money in China now. The article has no graphs showing the amount of money made online, just the number of people, which only goes to show the lack of concern many times in the SEO community to look beyond pure traffic.

In any case, if you plan on expanding to China for an online business, prepare for a long-term investment rather than a short-term gain.

Sidenote: The article probably does not fit to the right audience for the post sadly when the first comment mentions that China has a Communist government–a comment that should have been sent back 10 years when it would have at least been semi-accurate. Yes, the party is called the Chinese Communist Party, but like anything one should quickly learn in life, just because someone likes to call themselves something, does not mean it is true.