The Internet may feel US-centric today, but there’s a big and rapidly connecting world out there. Leading web traffic monitoring service Experian Hitwise announced today the launch of its newest venue: Hitwise China.
Hitwise is great about publishing timely tidbits about web statistics and I look forward to seeing US, global and China stats contrasted. The first offering along those lines? Hitwise says that microblogging is more common in China than it is in the UK, US, France, Canada, Australia or India. Sina Micro blog, the leading Chinese microblogging service, sees 1 out of every 158 website visits in China, Hitwise observed last month. That’s more than 3.5 times as large a web market share as Twitter has here in the US. That sounds like a good market to go monitor.
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Sina is also bigger than Twitter is in the UK, though Twitter is 2X as commonly visited in the UK as it is in the US too. Microblogging seems to have taken off much more in other countries in general than it has in the US.
In the US, Facebook (which Hitwise does not count as Microblogging) sees 64% of all social networking site visits. Why different social networks have found different levels of traction in different countries and cultures will be a fruitful field of study for the future. The investment of one of the most communicative of the web analytics companies online into the large market of China could be a helpful step in our collective understanding of the changing international web.
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