Some Chinese news sites report that Google China is to announce partnership with Tianya Club tomorrow to launch a service like Baidu Zhidao (similar to Yahoo Answers). Google China offers search technologies while Tianya would be in charge of community management.
Tianya Club, founded on Feb 14 1999, is one of the most popular discussion forum in China. Give you one example, all my Chinese friends know Tianya; one of them told me that she could stay there for the whole day without going out. By the first half of 2007, Tianya has almost 20 million registered users, 80% of which are between 18 to 35 years old. 80% of its users have income of over 1000 yuan (US$125).
The possible domain for this coming service is “wenda.tianya.com”. If you type this URL into the browser, it ends up with no where. However, I did a ping on this sub-domain of Tianya.com, and found response from Google China’s server:
“wenda” are the pinyin of two Chinese characters. “wen” in English is “ask”; “da” in English is “answer”. It is obvious that Google would take care of all the technology part while Tianya manages the community.
There are quite a number of Chinese community websites like Tianya which need digital marketing agencies’ attention. With equipping of proper geo-targeting and tracking technologies, they would be very powerful digital advertising and marketing platforms.
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1 Rumor: Google China Buying 5 Million Stake In Comsenz » Make Meaning // Nov 28, 2007 at 10:43 pm
[...] 15 that Google has already invested in 4 to 5 Chinese companies. But, the public only know their investment in Tianya and Xunlei. Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share [...]
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