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No There There
The content on Asian websites leaves much to be clicked on
By ERIC ELLIS
October 28, 1999
Web posted at 1 a.m. Hong Kong time, 1 p.m. EDT
Examine your Internet bookmark list and admit it. How many of your 100-odd "favorites" are Asian in origin? The anecdotal answer I got in a straw poll of regional Net users taken over the past few months is less than 5%.
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And the reason? The most common answer is that the regional content is lacking. Asian Web pages, be they in English, Chinese, Thai or Bahasa Indonesia, are not "sticky."
My own 500-strong list, of which about 50 are visited regularly, carries just a dozen or so local sites. And all but four are Net versions of existing print media. Of the four that aren't, one is my bank, another is my grocer, a third is a sharp financial commentary site out of Hong Kong and the last, a Net industry newsletter that's more often late than on the mark. My own list is a sad indictment on the strength of regional content.
Think about it. Can the much-heralded China.com be worth more than $1 billion on NASDAQ because it carries state-sanctioned stories from China's Xinhua news agency (a.k.a. "American writer admires China") or gives instructions in the Chinese tea ritual?
Sure, some of China.com's value is community building--and most of it is in the infinite but historically unrealized promise of its domain name--but once you've first attracted users with hype, how do you keep them coming back in order to build that community? Surely not with Xinhua copy.
Or look at the Singapore financial portal Asiastockwatch.com. There's little on that site that I can't read on better presented, written and edited sites located outside Asia. I want informed goss and market-moving scuttlebutt, not some meandering rant from a second-rate stock analyst from a brokerage I've never heard of.
The sad fact is that Asian content is lacking. It's downright poor. That means it's a huge business opportunity for enterprising people in the content provision game. But it's also one of the Asian Net's biggest negatives. If users can't trust or enjoy Asian content, why bother using the Net for much more than sending e-mail or buying groceries?
People like Chris Justice of Asiacontent.com is one of the few who aims to fix it, buying up content-specific sites like the Asian franchises of CNET, E! Online and MTV to build community loyalty, add value and--with it--spice. "The Net should be a fun experience," says Justice.
The U.S.-born Netpreneur has been in Asia for 12 years and spent much of the '90s in Hong Kong setting up the South China Morning Post's Web presence. He admits it was tough going convincing the SCMP executives that investing in the Web was a good long-term idea. They asked all the obvious questions that old-media companies ask themselves: "Why give away content for free when people pay for the same stuff in print?" "How do we make money from this?"
Reliable answers have yet to be found. But newspaper executives skilled in content provision have found that free Web content does not (yet) cannibalize the print version but actually adds readers--and advertising reach--while reinvention in the stock market's eyes as "an Internet company" can send that share price soaring.
The best regional example of that is probably in Australia where the main old-media companies, John Fairfax and Consolidated Press, have seen their stock prices roar over the past year because they declared they had an Internet presence. It mattered little that neither company's Web division made any real money. That's also happening in Singapore where SPH Holdings, the newspaper monopoly, has seen its share price shoot up because of rumors it may float its websites, mere reprises of their print editions.
All of which makes me wonder why old-media companies don't sell their content to websites that need it and are media-oriented in nature. The Boston Consulting Group tallies around 1,500 websites in Asia (ex-Japan) selling something, sites involved in e-commerce of some sort that need users to find them and, when they do, keep coming back to them. Website creation is, if nothing, a publishing exercise but not all people who want (or need?) to be on the Web are publishers or skilled in information presentation.
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