The China Vortex

A few days ago I read an interview with Steve Jobs published in Fortune in March. One of the ideas which Steve Jobs put forth is that you really need to understand the technology issues, then follow how they will roll out in order to be successful. Apple has a certain advantage because it owns the operating system and the hardware. This means that the hardware and technology can be integrated much more tightly together.

This makes me think that one of the issues with the current media and advertising space in China is that there is not enough understanding of the integration of the hardware and software. Basically, DoubleClick came up with the idea of the banner ad, then Google came up with the idea which came from came up with the idea of PPC advertising on the search results page, and the algorithms which would optimize the system to become a money machine for Google. For too long, players in this space have come from the media space, offering a “me too” solution full of buzzwords but with little real content to differentiate.

What did Google do which was so different from Yahoo!, the leading Web 1.0 portal? They got very close to the technology, to the point where they built the servers and disks, and created MapReduce, Google’s search technology which could run on huge clusters.

Now, I hear a lot of talk about all the startups in China, but most of the time, I don’t see how any new technology is used to take a whole new look at how advertising should be delivered over a complex network. Most are consumer plays which do not deliver anything spectacular. That would not be an issue if they had a good feel for the marketing process, but more often than not, they do not. As a result, most advertising buys gravitate to the big online media companies, which include Sina, Sohu, Netease and QQ, as Kaiser Kuo frequently talks about in his blog at Ogilvy China Digital Watch.

In fact, we are just at the beginning of a whole new wave for technology and advertising: this is the mobile wave. Handset makers now only pay US$15 per handset for software, and with the upcoming development and launch of Google’s Android, per handset payouts are going to go down even more. This means only one thing: there will have to be a steady advertising revenue stream to finance all the content. The mobile network though is not one network, it will have to be two:

• The search and search results network including GPS location-based detection
• The network delivery system

In software development, there is the MVC or model/view/controller system for software design. The rules are defined at the model level, there is the presentation end for how the viewer sees the content (Apple is now taking a grab at this with the Apple iPhone) for view and the controller, which connects the rules at the model level with the view, and handles delivery.

Basically, Apple is trying to leverage its control of the iPhone audience at the view level to get leverage with the carriers, who act at the model level. In some markets it has been successful, but not with China Mobile so far. The handset makers such as Nokia, Samsung, and LG have solutions, but since their product lines are spread across so many products, they have little leverage unless they came up with their own operating system and hardware as Apple has. What are the chances of that happening? Microsoft has a solution with Microsoft Windows Mobile, but it is just one among many players and does not have a dominating position on any of the model, view and controller levels of the mobile network.

China Mobile has made no secret of its plans to control the platform as much as possible by virtue of its near-monopoly role in this space. Ultimately, it will have to make marketing choices about what audience it wants to serve: the casual youth market or the productivity worker, and how to maximize revenue from the market they choose. The only way for them to avoid having to make this choice is to offer contextual advertising on the mobile network. It would make a lot of sense for China Mobile to buy Baidu to protect its mobile advertising revenue stream from Google, and then make a serious technology effort to combine improved search algorithms with location services. Search technology involves a great deal of non-trivial technology which cannot be easily replicated, even by a company as huge as China Mobile.

As for smaller players, they will have to come up with ways to get revenue from a market which has been bombarded with a huge amount of free content.

Google has a tremendous advantage with the Google Android operating system, which will have hooks built into it for search and location services. If you think that they are giving a mobile phone OS away for free just because they are nice people, you are delusional. They are offering a new mobile ad platform with other services to attract developers.

I expect that the mobile network will very soon become the “smart network” compared to the PC-based network, which will become the “dumb network” because it does not have location sensitivity. (Of course, newer computers will have location sensitivity. This will then combine with Google’s current services to deliver ads which will make the current ad networks look like something from the Stone Age.) The PC network will continue to be good for banner and brand advertising, but if you really want smart contextual advertising which operates on a PPC basis, mobile will be the leader.

The smaller mobile players will have to pay “toll fees” to the model (China Mobile, China Unicom, etc,.) and view (Apple) players. It will be much harder to get onto the technology ramp for mobile than it is for the PC, at least in the beginning.

Technorati Tags: android, Apple, baidu, China, chinamobile, doubleclick, google, gps, iPhone, lg, microsoft, Nokia, samsung, search, stevejobs, yahoo

One of the great challenges in the digital world is: “How to create value?” People are spending more and more time online, and are moving to a mobile Internet, which has been attested to by the success of Apple’s iPhone platform. But spending online has lagged behind, especially in China, where advertising has been slow to take off.

Obviously there is something wrong with this picture. What can be done to bring value to people, and are companies looking in the wrong places?

Advertising has been established in the west for more than a century, but it has been much slower to take off in China. There are several reasons for this: for one thing, after having been a strictly socialist society for nearly thirty years, there really wasn’t much of an ad industry in China in the period from 1949 to 1977. A consumer society did not exist, and Chinese citizens did not have many choices. There was the hukou system which meant that Chinese citizens could get enough of what they needed, but only if they were in the right city, and only enough to take care of their basic necessities.

After 1977, when China started to open up, the ad industry had to basically build up from almost nothing. Now, in 2008, it is one of the few markets where ad revenue is growing by leaps and bounds. In the west, many companies are questioning the effectiveness of advertising in the face of the growing power and effectiveness of the Internet and its poster boy for online advertising, Google.

Still though, there is plenty of room for alternative business models. In 1999, while Yahoo! was earning a great deal of ad revenue from banner ads, Chinese companies had to look for alternative business models which were grounded in how Chinese were willing to accept value, and were willing to pay for it with real money.

Tencent, the creator of the fabulously successful QQ IM client, has probably the most successful virtual currency in the world, Q-Coins (in Chinese, Q-bi, it means “Q currency”). Since its introduction, it has become a fabulously successful currency which has its own currency exchange rate, and is bought and sold offline. In short, to many Chinese, it is a real currency with value. This is a case of something which was created in the virtual world, was deemed to have value, and then taken into the offline world.

This leads to a very interesting question for social networks: If Q Coins have been so successful as an online social currency for transactions among community members in China, then why haven’t the western SNS sites such as Facebook, Friendster, etc. created their own currencies which their own members could use worldwide? And why should there not be a secondary market for trading these virtual currencies among themselves, and then with real currencies?

Ogilvy China Digital Watch has done an excellent job of keeping an eye on the development of online advertising in China. But I have a question: “If the volume of online currency denominated transactions were added to digital adspend in China, how would that compare to how much is spent on online advertising in America?”

Could it be that in fact China is already a leader in bringing online-created goods and services to the offline world, and is ahead of the west?

Who knows, maybe the answer for a global ad agency like Ogilvy would be to issue its own virtual currency and to get as many people worldwide to use it as possible?

Now that would be a twist!

Technorati Tags: advertising, banners, businessmodels, China, currencies, google, ogilvy, online, q-coins, qq, US, virtual, yahoo

One of the most popular cliches in the west about China is that Chinese are generally good and reasonable people, but when it comes to nationalism, they are unreasonable. On the political level, national sovereignty is not negotiable, and when it comes to business, you need to realize that nationalism is a wildcard, and can throw a monkey-wrench into your best-laid plans. Put into this context, the 2008 Beijing Olympics is all about righting past wrongs, and showing that China is now an equal, maybe even a leader, in the world stage.

Like all bad cliches, this cliche contains a kernel of truth.

In my previous article, I mentioned why it’s so important for any business to be successful in China, decisions must be made locally by local management; it cannot be micromanaged from the US or anywhere else. Established business sectors such as finance, banking, retail, and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), all understand this very basic rule of international business.

In the venture capital field in China, there has been a large influx of companies and partnerships which have opened offices and partnerships in Beijing and Shanghai. These companies understand that good investment decisions must, for the most part, be made in China where the local partners can understand the business environment, the competition and perform the due diligence to make the right decisions. Smart decisions cannot be made outside China.

And even that is not necessarily enough. Now more companies are going into the Chinese tier 2 and 3 cities and they are realizing that Beijing and Shanghai have more in common with New York, London or Tokyo than with other Chinese cities.

So why do so many US technology companies continue to try to second-guess and micromanage their China local management?

This is a mystery to me, and I continue to be befuddled by it. How can intelligent people continue to make and repeat over and over again mistakes which others have made before?

And then, when the Chinese local management complains that they are not empowered, sometimes they dismiss it as the Chinese “going nationalistic”. Never mind that the people questioning the Chinese management in the US do not speak, read or write Chinese; never mind that the people coming into China spend only a few days on the ground in China and think that they have China “all figured out”, yet they continue to do this over and over again.

Does this make sense? Any sense at all? And should there be any surprise that leading US companies including Yahoo!, eBay and AOL have failed in China?

And yet, these people control the budget and resource allocation for China. Should there be any surprise at all that US Internet companies have not been able to be successful in China?

What value do these people contribute to the success of the business in China? I can’t see any. Then when the company fails, it isn’t because headquarters slowed down the decision loop; it’s because of “poor performance by local management”!

They have set up Chinese local management to be the fall guy even before they started!

If this thinking were only confined to Internet companies and startups in China, it would be bad, but in the overall economic picture, it wouldn’t be that important.

The problem for the west is that it isn’t.

It has affected the west’s popularity in Africa because China offers aid without strings attached. In the mainstream media in the west, this is depicted as a cynical attempt by the Chinese to curry favor with regimes which behave badly.

But could there be more to it than meets the eye?

Could it be that the Africans don’t like to have someone dictate loan and development terms from Washington DC, London or Paris, and setting performance benchmarks for them without understanding the context of development in their own countries and region?

And could it be that the real reason for the popularity of the Chinese is that for better or for worse, they have gone local, setting up their own businesses and factories in Africa instead of trying to dictate terms from Beijing?

Definitely this is something worth pondering…

Technorati Tags: africa, AOL, beijingolympics, business, China, ebay, economics, economy, internet, london, management, paris, US, washington, west, yahoo

Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service has written an open letter to Steve Ballmer on Microsoft strategy which is posted at the new online version of The Industry Standard.

FYI, Mark Anderson is the owner of Strategic News Service, which publishes a newsletter aimed at technology executives. It’s full of insights and he pulls no punches.

If you read this blog, you should read SNS.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, steveballmer, technology, yahoo

Information Arbitrage has an excellent article on how the different cultures at Microsoft and Yahoo! would have trouble coming together; he compares it to the difference between football players and baseball players.

This is one of those soft things which the number crunchers and bean counters usually miss, but invariably hits the outcome of a merger.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, yahoo

The quality and amount of discourse on the proposed takeover of Yahoo! by Microsoft has had my bullshit meter jumping off the charts, and I felt I just had to chime in.

Paul Kedrosky summed it up best when he said that it would benefit Google the most. Anyone with half a brain and who has worked in corporate management more than one week knows that the most painful thing to do in business is to grow by acquisition. Acquisitions are especially hard to do in a market which has matured relatively quickly in the US, such as search advertising. But analysts and senior management sometimes like to do acquisitions because it creates a lot of buzz. And in the lousy US market nowadays, any buzz which does not include the keyword “subprime” is welcome buzz.

Organic growth is the much better way, and in the long run, yields better results. A lot of early Google talent has been cashing in their chips and leaving the company; shouldn’t Microsoft focus on hiring some of those very smart people to beef up their search offerings? Wouldn’t that be a better way to catch up to Google’s search technology? Yes, and I’m sure that Microsoft is doing that right now, but it doesn’t capture the imagination of the old media folks the way Microsoft! would.

“Let’s toss a big fat red herring to the dumb masses!”

In spite of its management problems, Microsoft still has a formidable technology pool of talent. The fact that it cannot create an operating system as reliable as Apple’s Leopard even though it has more than three times the number of employees is more a testament to bad management of talent and resources than to anything else. It could even be argued that Ubuntu Linux has a friendlier and more stable operating system, and it has almost no revenue, and almost everyone working on it is a volunteer!

So why does Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer want to do this deal? I see it as hail-Mary desperation pass to show that he is “doing something”. If you are saying that it is useless and dumb, then you have a problem. You see, you have committed the unforgiveable sin of looking too closely and thinking too much.

Shame on you!

To add to the entertainment value of this show, Google has jumped in with claims that it is seeking to protect the “openness of the Internet from a closed company like Microsoft”. Now, I have had many images of the Internet, but I have never quite had the image of the Internet as this beautiful bride about to be horribly ravished by some mean thug in the northwest. As a matter of fact, I think that the Internet has been ravished many times before, continues to be ravished, and somehow manages to live with it and get along with life.

Now, if Google has suddenly discovered that Microsoft is closed, why should it limit itself to complaining about Microsoft? Why not go after nation-states which are not famous for openness, and frequently tinker with the “openness” of the Internet. If they have any trouble thinking of any, they are welcome to call me.

I could easily come up with more than 190 names.

So Google can now also score points with your senile old grandfather, the one who criticized Microsoft for being a monopoly way back in the 90s, but still makes sure to keep his copies of Microsoft Office current.

YEAH, GOOGLE STANDS FOR OPENNESS!

Now, to add to Uncle Steve’s general cluelessness, he comes out with this gem stating that Google has no products, it only has search. He may not have heard it, but there is a whole bunch of businesses which don’t have products; they’re called services.

Yes, Google doesn’t have any products; it only has services. But the services produce something called search advertising revenue by matching advertisers with content providers using keywords and taking a chunk of revenue in the process.

Do you think that Steve knows why he’s buying Yahoo?

Frightening thought, isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: acquisitions, advertising, google, keywords, microsoft, paulkedrosky, products, revenue, search, services, steveballmer, yahoo

For most of my career, I have been looking for patterns to discover why some companies come out of nowhere and become big and great, and why others who have dominated the market lose market share and users to the newcomers. More often than not, the newcomers are entrepreneurs who had a vision, while the established companies were as Lou Gerstner called it in his book, “Who Says Elephants Can’d Dance?”

I have looked at startups and established companies, and if there is one word which separates the hungry newcomers from the established, shall I say it, dinosaurs, it is fear. It is not so much the emotion, but how they react to the possibility of failure. More than anything else, this strikes at the heart of what differentiates the entrepreneur from the established firms which frequently end up belonging to another age, and usually end up being swept into the dustbin of history.

Most successful Internet companies, whether they are Yahoo! or Google in the US, and Shanda, Baidu, Alibaba or Tencent in China have one common theme in their histories. At some low point in their early years, their founder/s almost gave up, and they almost sold their companies at a low price to another company. When this happened, the founder/s would seriously consider their options. Sometimes they would lay off people, cut down their costs, maybe fight with their spouses who wanted them to quit and work for IBM or Microsoft or somehow throw in the towel and give up, or sell out. Then, when things were at their lowest point, their user numbers would go up, or they would secure funding and they would turn the corner and start to grow dramatically.

It is all about fear, and overcoming fear. When you have reached a low point, there is no more fear.

“What is the worse thing that can happen to you?”

That you will lose your house? Your car? Your spouse and family? That you will die and be forgotten? Are you willing to take these risks?

When you have reached that point, there is nothing more to fear. It’s all about willingness to sacrifice today in the belief that you will succeed tomorrow. What is there to lose? Money? That has already been invested. Quitting would only be a recognition of the loss; most entrepreneurs refuse to recognize the loss. This is what makes entrepreneurs special; the best ones are truly fearless.

On an individual basis, this is called a near-death experience. If you are not sure what I mean, watch the movie Fearless (1993).

And it’s not about money. They know that money buys the trappings of success such as a big house and trophy wife or mistresses, but that they are just trappings of success. After they become successful, they frequently look back on their “good old days”. And what are their good old days? When they didn’t know whether they would make the month’s payroll, or were living in their car, or eating instant noodles because they could not afford anything better.

This is not something which can be taught in business school. And this is why the US was, and now China is, a great place for entrepreneurs. It’s easy when you are starting from zero. More than any other markets, American business investors believe in the value and experience of failure; this is where Japan and Europe cannot compete with the US and China.

And this is why is it so difficult for large companies to make the leap or cross the chasm. The only way for a successful marketmaker to bridge the gap is to give up all its revenue, all its investments and to start over again.

That has not happened yet. Microsoft has tried to do it, but they cannot sacrifice revenue; their investors won’t let them. Yahoo! was a great Web 1.0 company with great assets but has had significant challenges reinventing itself from the glory days when banner ads were king. When companies become successful, they attract people who wish to avoid risk and who want to make money to buy their big homes, drive big cars and to have their status. They are risk avoiders, not risk takers. Once a company starts to attract this kind of person, it cannot re-invent itself.

It fears failure and won’t take risks.

Entrepreneurialism is all about finding success or failure relatively quickly by putting everything on the line. What the Internet has done in the US and now in China is it has sped up the failure and success cycle, collapsing the amount of time it takes to discover what works.

In my articles I am frequently critical of large businesses which cannot adapt to new changed situations; this is because they are afraid of fear and failure. They want to be market dominators at a time when the market is changing beneath their feet. They have meetings and talk and grumble and analyze, but most of the time they are not able to do much. They acquire small companies to maintain growth, and more often than not, they destroy the spark which made those startups successful in the first place. Or the smart people who have entrepreneurial talent and are willing to take the risks see market opportunities and become entrepreneurs in their own startups themselves.

That is why successful change always comes from the bottom, not from the top. And that is why the cycle of change will continue, only faster.

UPDATE: Frank Yu pointed me to this article by the consistently good Paul Graham who says a lot of the same things.

Technorati Tags: alibaba, baidu, change, China, cycle, entrepreneur, founder, google, ibm, microsoft, money, Shanda, tencent, US, yahoo

The consulting industry in China is flourishing. After all, it is the largest potential single market in the world, and everyone is flocking to it. New companies need information and advice about how to tackle the unique challenges of this market. For any MBA who is fluent in Chinese, or who has grown up in China, and is familiar with the tools of the trade, such as financial modeling, business negotiations and company valuations, China represents an “iron rice bowl” which will make their careers for years to come.

Or is it? My experience is that there are errors which are repeated over and over again. It gets like being condemned to watch a single Broadway show, over and over again, where the only things which change are the sets and the actors; the lines are the same.

I have covered one of the major fallacies in a previous posting, Getting Past the China Market Hype, which covered their initial reasons for entering China. This posting will cover some of the reasons for failing post-entry.

Since most of my experience has been with technology/media/startups from the US, I am naturally biased towards those companies in my evaluation. There have been many success stories from the financial sectors, engineering and consumer goods. These areas, unlike hi-tech, have had decades, and in some cases even more than a century of experience, building their China presence, and understanding the challenges involved. They have the money, and have built up a knowledge base of experience which they can draw from, and because of the large scale of their businesses, even if they cannot draw from in-house experience, they know how and where to get it when needed.

Some of the US technology companies which have come to China and have failed to succeed in the Chinese market are eBay, which basically had to hand over its operations in China after running into the strong local player, Taobao.com, in the auction field. Yahoo! had to basically pay a China partner, Alibaba.com, US1B to take over its China operations. More recently, Google, the US search advertising firm, has had to fight an uphill battle against the largest Chinese search firm, Baidu.com. Online gaming is a new area which does not exist in nearly as large a form as the US, with Shanda being the granddaddy in China, while newer players such as Perfect World (PWRD) have sprung up with new and different business models, and successfully going public on the Nasdaq. In instant messaging, Tencent’s QQ has been able to rack up 600M registered users, and unlike any US IM clients, become profitable.

Because most US startups come from technology backgrounds, they tend to believe that their business is scalable. The word “scalability” is in itself, an engineering term, which means that an architecture can go from 1 user to one billion (or infinite) users, or across national borders and into different languages and markets, without any major architectural hiccups. For this reason, they tend to play down distribution and cultural differences in their most initial stages. Most of the time, they have people on staff or in management who know something about the local market; more often than not, they are not in senior decision-making roles.

Then, when they get to China, they try to do what they did in the US, and quickly discover that the rules in China are very different. Whereas labor is very expensive in the US, with each hire drawing the attention of different company committees, in China it is one of the single cheapest expenses. (Except for senior and executive management, where highly qualified individuals cost just as much, if not more, than in the US.)

The most common failing comes in the area of product management, when the US insists on controlling the product development and launch schedule, with local product launches coming only after the US is ready. In smaller markets, that’s fine, but in fast-moving large markets, especially one as large as China’s, it’s a killer. (Even in fast-moving small markets it’s a dubious strategy; in South Korea, Google has been consistently beaten by Naver, a highly successful Korean company.)

This puts the China office in a continuous battle with the US headquarters for resources; the Chinese local competitor has no such restrictions on what it can do, and the Chinese company surges ahead in capturing market share, and eventually, revenue. The American company then organizes what can best be called a “strategic withdrawal”, as did eBay.

In more mature industries where there is some kind of brand equity, product lines are already fairly mature, and headquarters makes resources available to country managers as needed. Because of the fast-changing nature and relative immaturity of hi-tech, this has not yet happened.

When the American companies fail, the blame is usually assigned to some form of Chinese government protectionism, and favoritism to the local companies. Of course, this explanation is more palatable to Congress members seeking re-election and US TV talk-show hosts, but more often than not, it is a vast over-simplification of a complicated issue.

Technorati Tags: advertising, baidu, business, China, Chinese, google, HR, information, language, management, market, qq, resources, Shanda, trade, US, yahoo

Microsoft’s recent purchase of online ad market platform AdECN Exchange highlights the rise of neutral ad market platforms as a new venue for the buying and selling of ads between content publishers and advertisers.

Online ad market platforms represent the next stage, or second generation, of ad networks. The first generation was represented by Google Adsense, the company’s successful platform for publishers, which provided ad inventory from independently-published websites for Google Adwords, the ad targeting and delivery system, and Google’s cash cow.

First generation ad platforms such as the Adwords/Adsense platform have used real-time indexers, or spiders, to scan content for keywords, and then match up advertisers with inventory. Technologically, this is great non-trivial technology, but there are also problems with it.

• If you are an ad publisher or advertiser, you need to join a network (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Baidu, etc.). By joining a network, you automatically lose advertising and revenue opportunities with other prospects who may not be members of the same network.
• Advertisers and publishers are entrusting a third-party to act as their facilitator and to act in their best interests. While search engines make claims to be objective and neutral; this is in fact impossible. Just do a search on a term of your choosing across several different search engines, and compare the search results.
• As search engine companies go public and come under pressure from Wall Street and investors, management’s strategy is always to blur the line between organic (free search) and pay-per-click (PPC) search. As revenue becomes more important, search results become more skewed to favor sites which belong to their publishers’ network.
• Click fraud is a major problem which the search engines have never been able to come clean about. Aside from waffle statements to the effect that “click fraud is a minor problem which does not affect most users”, all search engines, even Google, have been reluctant to provide independent third-party statistics about click fraud. This reluctance to come clean has led many to believe that the problem is greater and would affect their revenue more than they want investors to know. In a worst case scenario, it could be manipulated into a Ponzi scheme.
• In certain markets such as China, where keywords are sold through distributors, there is even wider room for abuse through distributor collusion. This is why advertiser groups have formed organizations such as Fanbaidu who have challenged charges for advertising clicks made to their accounts.
• As the Cluetrain Manifesto made clear, along with Seth Godin, marketing and blogging are becoming increasingly about conversations. Blogs are nothing more than linked conversations on a given topic, and sometimes they ramble on by themselves. For this reason, blog content resists a “one size fits all” approach, hence the attractiveness of the long tail approach. For unique content, neutral ad platforms where buying and selling is done by human buyers and sellers online work better than networks which have their algorithms continuously tweaked. Since the most knowledgeable seller is the creator of the content, this means that more and more, content creators will become marketers and publishers of their own content. After all, the main task of a publisher is to attract good content creators and market their work.

This is why the ad exchange system is the trend of the future; it works best for unique content and for the long tail. Compared to ad networks, they are more transparent. Click fraud collusion is made much more difficult because the market is real-time and more dynamic, and the content creators and publishers would have it in their own best interests to fight and resist click fraud. Transparency rewards the honest over the long term. Exchanges are not perfect and Ponzi schemes can also develop in exchanges, but this has more to do with human nature than exchanges.

The problem with the advertising industry, as it exists today, is it is built for a world where advertisers and inventory are comparatively static, and where audiences are defined as being “mass market”. In today’s online market, where peoples’ needs, care and interests are constantly changing on a real-time basis, the question should become “Is there a mass market anymore, and what is its definition in quantitative and qualitative terms?” If the answer is no, then the main currency of advertising becomes attention, which would then have to be translated into monetary terms not only on an individual, but on a time basis. Pushed to its logical outcome, advertisers would need to pay consumers for their time and attention.

In an article on Ogilvy China Digital Watch, Kaiser Kuo raised the question about why ad exchanges were slow to take off in China. Although there may be many reasons, I believe the most important single reason is that content creators want to just create content, and don’t like the idea of marketing, buying and selling their own content or becoming publishers. They want to write for someone else and be paid, and don’t want to take the risk themselves. This problem is not unique to China; it will affect takeup of the online ad exchange model all over the world.

Of course, the market always tend to reward the individuals who see and act on opportunities before others.

Technorati Tags: AdECN, adsense, advertising, adwords, baidu, google, marketing, microsoft, msn, ogilvy, yahoo