Our friends over at Danwei (sadly blocked by our own most favorite net nanny) recently sat down with Ah Bei, CEO of culture focused SNS, Douban. Douban has been going for 4 years, and recently has been on a tear. According to our research, Douban’s registered user base expanded from 4m in April to a shade over 8m today. It focuses on art, books and music and centres around “interests”, linking likely souls. It is increasingly used as the basis for campaigns by the more “thoughtful” brands. You can read the full article below if you are behind the GFW, or in all Danwei glory HERE (if you are not so constrained).
INTERNET CULTURE
Ah Bei, CEO of douban.com, on the website as a “creative stage”
Posted by Alice Xin Liu, September 10, 2009 2:15 PM
Douban.com is based on users organizing events around their interests, forming discussion groups, fan pages of brands, bands, people etc. Users also have their own pages, listing books they’ve read, CDs they’ve listened to, and movies they’ve watched. They can write reviews and link to their blog, which appears in extracts on their page. People with similar interests therefore find one another. The website has dominated the online cultural scene for the last four years.. Douban was started by Ah Bei (阿北), who returned from the US after studying for a PhD in Physics at the University of California. Ah Bei also worked at IBM for two years before doing a start-up in Beijing. Having a passion for books and music, Ah Bei formed a social networking-type website based on user-generated material and very little editing. Now they have a team of just under a hundred working near Dashanzi in Beijing. Ah Bei acts as product developer and CEO. Although the engineering side is important for Ah Bei and his team, it’s a passion for music, literature and movies that keeps the website going － and the reason why millions visit the site. Ah Bei gave Danwei a face-to-face interview about why the website is edgy, how groups are formed and why some disappear, as well as its status as host for independent music.
=========================
Danwei: Is douban for highly educated, more bookish, cultural and intellectual users?
Ah Bei: Douban users are in higher education, and some are doing higher training courses (大专), and they are more educated than the average Chinese reader. Our focus is books, movies and music, and we are a lot more culture orientated.
Danwei: Is that what you wanted when you started douban?
Ah Bei: Not at all, it was more of a technical vision, but we hoped to attract a lot of book lovers, which had a huge impact on the company in China, generating more users and more interest in the community. But if you look at the make-up of the company, 70% are engineers; we don’t have editors. Our company is cultural and bookish: our core users are cultural people, and the content is user-generated; we don’t create any content.
Danwei: Is it a good business?
Ah Bei: It’s more like localization and translation － at the beginning it didn’t have movies but only books and music, actually. I haven’t seen any sites that combine books and music. I can give you a lot of reasons about why it’s successful… one of the reasons is that, when douban started rolling four years ago, dangdang.com and joyo.com had only one line commentaries about service and delivery, and our recommendation knowledge was better quality. It’s a place where creative types come together to create some space, and we never stop them using the space to create, talk or make the pages that they want to make. There is the space to do this, unlike on Xiaonei (now Renren) or Kaixin where most of the interactions are focused on one page of a particular user, or like joyo or dangdang where there is only a comments section and two out of three comments are about the technical problems of delivery, and not about the product itself. Also, the douban engineers and editors take a kind-of hands-off attitude and don’t interfere with the subjects and topics, so it’s freer, and a creative platform for creativity. Douban.com was a little known website, so there are a lot of reasons [that it’s successful], douban got a lot of attention for its products, and innovation, from out of China, so it was quite different. We didn’t get a lot of attention in the US market when we tried to enter that. But although Douban.com is a Chinese site, more than 5% comes from out of China from overseas Chinese. Danwei: Discussion groups have been shutting down over the past year － usually involving the discussion of sensitive topics. Groups such as Southern Weekly, the Chang Ping group and various other newspaper or magazine groups.
What was the cause and how do you feel about this?
Ah Bei: Douban obviously focuses on culture and urban life, and has never been a political or radical site, the product itself makes it easier for users to share their interests: there are over 20,000 user groups, all about different topics. A group like Southern Weekly only holds a tiny percentage of the audience; more than 90% of the groups are about life, books and movies. And it’s very simple, we have to comply with local regulations, and we didn’t have a choice.
Danwei: There was nothing that you could do?
Ah Bei: We hate it. But the groups being shut down is only a small part of douban. People who are interested in a certain topic think that on douban others are also interested. For example a forty year-old professor will think that douban is full of people who are that age and are doing the same things that they are.
Danwei: Do you feel that you are competing with the other social networking sites?
Ah Bei: Some people use Xiaonei (now Renren) and some people use Kaixin － but they tend to use these at the same time, and they attract totally different users, douban has never been an SNS site; it has a community or social networking community. Perhaps it’s a social network based on books, or on movies, but douban is broader than that. Douban actually stands at 30 million unique visitors a month. Douban is more community focused than a social network, it’s a public sharing site, so it’s more like Tianya.cn and Mop.com. Douban users are aged between 20 － 35, and usually single, therefore they have enough time to socialize on the Internet. Mop tends to be younger and Tianya to be older, i.e. those who have started families. We don’t compare to Xiaonei or Kaixin because they are connecting people who know each other offline. When people feel attached to it, such as when they go to events and tell people they’re the leader of a certain douban group, I feel very proud. We see douban as a stage, but we never jump onto the stage and say, “Look how great I am.” We don’t have the energy or power to sponsor events but our users can organize them. Look at douban’s groups in Beijing and Shanghai: it has ten or twenty of the largest groups, but organizing events are not easy, and it has not been our target of the last two years.
Danwei: Is douban a platform for independent music groups and bands? The artists’ pages rank as some of the most popular.
Ah Bei: Actually one of the guitarists for PK14 works here as the music editor. We have more than two million books and music. They need to review everything, including the cover image… But it’s not writing or editing. They also need to review the bands to make sure it’s not a fake band or anything. The reason there is such a platform for independent music on douban is because they have nowhere else to go. People who like Jay Chou (周杰伦) or Chris Lee (李宇春) have so many places to go. They are big pop stars who have big audiences who can go to any major website; they don’t need to come to douban but independent artists have very little place to go. For douban, its users upload musicians’ pages very quickly and frequently, and this frequency means that more independent music stays at the Douban.
Danwei: Why do you think douban is edgy?
Ah Bei: Popular books like The World Is Flat has a traditional Chinese version too, published in Hong Kong, so there are reviews of this in Chinese. Douban already has an impact on these books, inspiring collaborative translation work and blogs. Movies are most popular now, and then books. One of the reasons the reviews are so that helpful is because it helps communication. Our ability to innovate is why it’s edgy. Douban.com is only the first step: we also have 9dian (9点), the blogging platform, and people who use it actually love it. Next time we have something great or major we might consider actually getting an international audience: launching it bilingual － there’s no reason we shouldn’t.
We have also translated some of Doubans own press for your pleasure:
Douban www.douban.com
豆瓣是什么?(what’s douban?)
- douban is a website of white-collar and college students’ living and sharing (豆瓣是 都市白领 和 大学生 生活、分享的网站)；
- douban is a innovation website which based on the core of technologies、products、life and culture (豆瓣是以技术和产品为核心、生活和文化为内容的创新网站)；
- by the end of March 6th,2009, douban was 4 years old (到2009年3月6日，豆瓣成立4周年)；
- there are 35 million people visite the douban per month, every month’s page views are about 600 million (每月有3500万人在访问豆瓣，每月pv约6亿)；
豆瓣人群(What kind of people visit the sites)
- Well educated 高学历
- High-income高收入
- Live in Metropolis生活在大都市
- Above-average spending power超出一般的消费能力
- Opinion leaders意见领袖
- Sensible 有判断力
- High sensitivity of the fashion 对时尚敏感度高
- A mature social relationships 有成熟的社会关系
- Strong interaction 互动性强
- among 35 million visiotors per month, 90% of the users are white-collar and college students (每月3500万的访问者中，90%用户为白领和大学生)；
- 80% of users have college degree or above (80%的用户拥有大学本科以上学历)；
- 70% of users come from first-tier cities (70%的用户来来自一线城市)；
- 80% of users aged 21-36 (80%的用户年龄在21-36岁)；
- more than 55% of users’ income above 5,000RMB (55%以上的用户收入在5000元以上)；
- the ratio of male and female users are quite average (男女用户比例平均)；
豆瓣音乐(special features)
- douban music is one of an important element 豆瓣音乐是豆瓣重要的一个内容之一；
- douban music’s core content is based on record、artists and reviews, which is the most influential internet music brand 豆瓣音乐以唱片、音乐人、评论为核心内容，是国内最有影响力的互联网音乐品牌；
- there are 55 million catalog of albums on douban, and montyly new albums are near 10 thousand 豆瓣上有55万张唱片条目，每月新收录唱片近万张；
- there are 20 million collection times of records, montyly new collection times over 1 million 有2000万人次收藏过 唱片条目 ，每月新增收藏人次逾100万；
- there are nearly 3,000 indie artists on douban 豆瓣上有近3000个独立音乐人；
- douban has 3,0000 music-related groups, everyday has 2,0000 topics been talked and delivered 豆瓣上有3万个音乐相关小组，每天有2万个音乐话题被讨论传递；
- 3000 music events have been created every month 每月有来自全国3000个音乐演出活动被创建；
- every month there have 15000 interactive events been created 每月有15000个互动活动被创建；
- there are 2 million kinds of books、55,0000 music albums and 10,0000 movies on douban豆瓣上有200万种书目、55万张音乐专辑、有10万部电影；
- there are 15,0000 types of interest groups on douban, every day, nearly 10,0000 topics have been talked and passed 豆瓣上有15万各类兴趣小组，每天有近10万个话题被讨论和传递；