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China Internet Users Soar To 450 Million, But Search Remains Low

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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China now has 450 million people online, a number nearly 50% greater than the population of the US. The Xinhua news agency reports that Wang Chen, head of China’s State Council Information Office, released figures that show a 20.3% increase in the numbers of Chinese online from November 2009 to last month. The total represents 33.9% of the total population in the People’s Republic.

Wang expressed concerns about hacking, viruses, and the pornography spread on the Internet.

The news raises the question of why China’s large Internet companies do not have higher revenue. Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU), by far the largest search engine in the country, had only $337 million in revenue in the third quarter of 2010. That is dwarfed by Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) $7.4 billion.

One theory is that the Chinese do not use search engines. local portals, or e-commerce sites as much as people do in Western nations because the central government tracks online activity carefully. That represents a threat to those who may perform actions online that the People’s Republic would consider illegal.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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