Number of netizens in China reaches 79.5 million

[takagi]

China's Internet community has multiplied 128 times in a little more than six years, new statistics show. ... China's Internet population surpassed Japan by the end of 2002, jumping to the second in the world following the United States.

Source: Chinese Internet surfers hit 80 million [www1.chinadaily.com.cn]

[bcolflesh]

Unfortunately my experience would break that number down like this:

70 million spammers
9 million domain squatters
.5 million decent folks

[bill]

You don't have much experience in China then...;)

The China/Chinese speaking market is clearly one of the biggest single markets on the net. You'd better brush up on your characters. This is not a market to be overlooked.

[roddy]

Agreed. There's plenty of rubbish coming out of China, but take a look at the size of the place - what do you expect?

Put it simply, there are lots of people here, with increasing amounts of money they want to spend, and they're often suprisingly willing to spend it over the internet. Watch that space.

That's the view from Beijing, anyway.

Roddy

[takagi]

THE National Football League will roll out a Chinese-language version of its Web site this month in yet another move by American entertainment and media organizations to capitalize on overseas Internet audiences.

The new N.F.L. site, which the league plans to announce this week, will offer all the usual NFL.com fare, but with the text translated to Mandarin Chinese.

Source: New York Times: American Web Sites Speak the Language of Overseas Users [nytimes.com]

You really think they would do that for 500,000 real surfers?

BTW, the site in your profile offers a machine translated version of the page in 11 languages including Chinese!?That's also a service for that small group?

[bill]

<opens can of worms>
98% of my spam comes from the US. A lot of the stuff you're seeing coming from China is probably US based outfits taking advantage of improperly configured relays in China. The problem over there sometimes is people using English language software without sufficient documentation in Chinese.

That's not to say that there aren't dedicated spam outfits in China...but I'll bet the number pales in comparison to the US...
<closes can of worms>