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CNNIC publishes SNS suvery: China SNS Users Reach 124 million

The China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) has just released its “2009 Chinese Netizens SNS Usage Research Report” which was conducted through July 2009. According to the report, nearly one-third of domestic Internet users are also SNS users, with the total number of SNS users expected to reach 124 million by the end of 2009.

People who have college degree or above are the majority of the SNS users, and students (50.3%) and white-collar (31.1%) are the two biggest user group.

They usually use more than one SNS site: the average SNS user has 2.78 accounts on social networking sites. Surprisingly, QQ Xiaoyou is the most popular SNS in China instead of RenRen. Based on the percentage of survey respondents who said they have used a given SNS (respondents were allowed to give multiple answers), the most popular SNS sites were: "QQ Xiaoyou" (literally "QQ Alumni"), 50%; Renren, 37%; Sina Spaces (is it a SNS?), 36.6%; 51.com, 27.1%, and Kaixin001, 26.4%.

The most popular features were: leaving messages for friends (51.2%), image/photo sharing (48.6%) and blog/diary functions (41.5%).

The most requested features included mobile access (40.9%), third-party payment support (25.6%), information search (22.6%), online games (21.9%) and instant messaging (21.6%). Now China has more than 180 million mobile internet user, SNS sites have a good prospects on mobile usage.

Users were most accepting of poll or Q&A-based advertising, with 29.9% approving; 26.6% preferred website or discussion topic-based advertising, while others chose title page-based advertising (24.6%), individual homepage-based advertising (22.1%) and image gallery-based advertising (17.1%). 16.1% approved of in-game advertising, 11.5% would accept offline activity-based ads, and only 9% were in favor of advertising embedded in add-ons. 15.2% disliked all forms of advertising.

You can download the survey document here (Chinese only).