Many American parents cringe when they learn about their offsprings’ behavior on the web. Salacious messaging, saucy photo sharing, revealing of intimate personal details – oh my! But the results of an IAC/JWT survey of 18-25 year olds in urban China and US suggest that American youths are relative church mice:
|
% agree |
China |
US |
|
Interactivity helps create intimacy, even at a distance |
82% |
36% |
|
It’s perfectly possible to have real relationships purely online with no face-to-face contact |
63% |
21% |
|
The Internet helps me make friends |
77% |
30% |
|
The Internet broadens my sex life |
32% |
11% |
I believe that these results have several implications. First, China will lead the world in the sales of virtual consumer goods. If people care so much about their online persona, you can bet that they won’t be holding back when accessorizing their digital alter-egos with everything from designer shoes to novelty genitalia. These “frivolous” items, rather than advertising, will likely form the bedrock of revenues for Chinese social networking sites in the near term.
Next, certain categories of relationship-based consumer web services that flopped in the US could flourish in China. One example is online dating, which has a spotty record at best in the US, while in China the dating site 51.com ranks among the top 10 online properties by visits. Another is demand aggregation, where large groups of people are rallied online to visit a store at the same time to demand a lower price for a specific item, sort of a physical variation of defunct sites like MobShop and Mercata.
Finally, there’s the intersection of all this social energy with the heavy usage of mobile phones. I believe that this will lead to many examples of innovation and invention that could push China ahead of the US in the mobile social networking domain.
