Page 105 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

starts off by taking full responsibility for the company’s mishaps: “I sacrificed
for three years and I learned a lot, but I wasn’t able to take this company to
success.” He did succeed in attracting approximately $2 million in online
advertising from big-name clients IBM, Amazon, and Hewlett-Packard. Also,
he lured in the telecom companies Nokia, Samsung, and China Mobile,
charging them a fee for wireless blogging services such as uploading photos
taken with a camera phone to Bokee’s site. He also brought in subscriber fees
for premium content such as big-name columnists.
Another initiative was Bokee Bank, modeled on the innovative South
Korean blog site Cyworld, which was introduced in August 2006. It attracted
1 million new bloggers and brought in about 10 percent of revenues. Under
the virtual currency system bloggers on Bokee charge their readers, Bokee
takes a 20 percent cut of the fee, and writers use their earnings to pay for
products and services online. It’s an idea that could work in the United
States too.
I come away with the impression that Bokee’s opportunities for money-
making ideas are limited. Most online advertising is centered on the top
Chinese portals, with specialized car, housing, and consumer goods sites
getting the leftovers, he says. Advertisers have not flocked to blogging sites in
China or the United States. Membership fees are an iffy source; most blogs
are free. Charging for VIP premier services is a possibility, but only block-
buster features get people to pay up. Another avenue is fees for blogging over
mobile phones, but that requires working closely with the monopolistic
phone networks in China to reach mass scale. One experimental model—
charging advertisers for referrals from the Bokee site—could blossom. Tan
mentions that the automaker Ford tried out a participatory blogging and
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advertising campaign for a car launch last summer that worked well. He
sees opportunities for other targeted ad campaigns to work but cautions
that for such a referral program to pay off, “You need a user base that is large
and sticky.”

A work in progress
Log on to the Bokee site and the vibrant home page appears, loaded with pop-
ups and streaming text, brightly colored subject headings, and sections for
news, blogs, and music and audio files, accompanied by a dashing bright red

Bokee.com—Growing Pains 79