Maitian dissects this little, most web 2.0-ish site in China and
tells the truth.
In Oct, 2005, I was in
the charge of product services at Tianya (a popular online community in
China) when Douban went online. The other day, I talked to a VC
about what could be the next nemesis of Tianya; he was a little awe-stucked when I told her the next one would be
Douban, in stead of Mop.
I’ve never thought Mop
was an opponent of Tianya, at the
time when I was a Tianya guy. And now
I’m saying what I said before: Douban
is still not a big player, even though I’ve left
Tianya. But I’m not alone. Just read
Douban news stories, you will find
the media has been irrationally sanguine about Mop fanfare, without
caring about stats. The fact is: Mop is just as big as 2 sections
at Tianya before being bought by
Yizhou Chen (more is in my last May
"Some stats about Mop" story), and there are a as many as 50
sections out there. Mop has got its big day since the
acquisition.
Although Douban was launched about 2 years ago, and it
didn't have as big traffic as Tianya
did, as an ex-Tianya guy, I knew that
Douban would be the biggest opponent
out there. And I’ve talked much more about that in a January
"Community 2007: Xie
Wen, Keso, Maitian talk in the New Year"
story.
I’m still optimistic
about Douban, but there are
some lurking “website service structure” problems
with it, and I had "the
Power of Douban" and
"Community:
Scale and Services and Contents" stories for this. Here I’m trying to answer the question:
Why is the
Douban's traffic
curve way too steep in 2005, but almost flat in
2006? For years of observations on Douban, personally I think
the reason is the structural problem with Douban itself.
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Douban's Alexa
traffic ranking curve
The mere
observation on traffic data didn’t render to me a full answer to
the question, still I
speculate that there are other factors working together to make a
big difference on the curve between in
2005 and 2006. I’m wondering what on earth those factors
are.
It seems that all of this is going to be unlocked when I
decided to get a study panel set up with He Tian,
GinTonic,
Si
Jian (his advice about the panel), Hilaa. The mission of panel is that we release
our case study report in which some exemplary websites will be
examined in more than one aspect, thus collecting our useful data
and experiences about running a site in Chinese website communities
as a guide or reference book.
Luckily, Douban is our first
case study. And I find myself surprisingly demystifying
Douban Curve after giving
Douban another analysis; the Curve
mystery could lead you guys to the real truth about
Doban.com
About traffic and service quality at
Douban
The Alexa ranking curve of
Douban, plus my experience about the
traffic data at Douban.com, shows Douban can have a traffic as big as 200,000 with
independent IP, 1,500,000 hits with PV. The traffic seems
unimpressive, as some people might say. Hey, guys. You need to
think again: Douban is just one-year
old, with such an extent of traffic. It’s quite impressive for me.
Of all the big traffic, many are exactly what Douban attracts with its high-quality
contents.
A
chart of Douban’s services is shown
below:
|
Service type
|
Original Featured
Service
|
community service
|
Social Networking
Services
|
Spin-off services
|
|
Items
|
Book/music review/movie(reviewing
and sharing)
|
groups
|
Neighbors
|
Nine-points blog
|
Among all services, OFS (Original Featured Service) is the
vital part as the key services beside other services. How do the
Douban users enjoy OFS? Some may
answer like this:
I read a book about movie or music. Or I want to buy a
book, but I’m not sure if I should do it. I can go to Douban for what others say about the
book.
I
agree on the answer because I was a veteran book club member, and I
know what those book buffs love to do. I assume that can be the
conventional way people use Douban
Some people point that the OFS is superlative because, as
they think, Douban guys have done
much works on “algorithm” and “user behavior analyses”. I have the
opposite views: Douban techies have
“algorithm” and “user behavior analyses” innovated quite much,
Nice job, guys. But, they were so
focused on the two key factors that much little work was done on
“user interaction”, which is a key build block of the whole service
structure. Put it simply, “algorithm” matters more than “user
interaction” to a site’s traffic.
Some of the readers might be shaking their heads. Well, you
can post your comments below. As an
experienced observant, I want to point out that only OFS website architecture are unlikely to sustain as big
traffic as 1,500,000 PV.
About Groups
It seems to me that Groups bring Douban.com the most part of
traffic. Here’s why:
There are totally 25851 groups at Douban.com, of which group
subscribers are listed below.
|
Subscribers
|
groups
|
total
|
|
More than 1000
|
240
|
240
|
|
500-1000
|
310
|
550
|
|
200－500
|
665
|
1215
|
|
100-200
|
735
|
1950
|
|
50-100
|
885
|
2835
|
|
20-50
|
1920
|
4755
|
|
10-20
|
1680
|
6435
|
|
5-10
|
3810
|
10245
|
|
3-5
|
4150
|
14395
|
|
2
|
4295
|
18690
|
|
1
|
7161
|
25851
|
Xba
at MiracleNote
has a short summary about the distribution stats on Douban Groups in the “Douban Groups are
NOT the Longtail cases” piece. “We
count the groups (with lower than 15 subscribers together), we got
the number of more than 60, 000 subscribers, but we put the first
groups (with more 500 users) together, the number is surprisingly
600,000, which is a steeper curve than statistical 28-dsitribution
curve, the number of latter 80% groups is just 1/10 of first 2%
(even not 20% ). I think the total
number will be 90% of the whole group numbers” he
writes.
Then, how big the groups with
big portion of Douban’s whole traffic are? I did an
analysis on the MoiveBuff (a red-hot group) stats yesterday, and
found that there have been more than 6500 posts since it was
created 700 days ago, equally, almost 10 posts in a single day. And
I count the latest 200 posts and 200 greatest-hit pieces, it turns
out there are so many responses among the cinephiles in the MovieBuff, the lasted 200 posts got 30 responses. The
200 greatest-hits have 20 comments.
It struck me as a new data continent that a most favorite
group is so powerful that it can have as big traffic as a section
in a large online community does. In the MoveBuff
case, the post comments can be 1/5 of the total number of Movie Review at Tianya.
Remember that MovieBuff is just a small group at Douban
For many years, data analyses have made me know much more
about the Douban traffic data than
any others. So I did a math job, calculating the traffic of
Douban Groups based on the
Tianya traffic data, then compared
with 150 PV of Douban. Here’s my
extrapolation: groups brought a big part of traffic of 150 PV, I
guess the exact number can be about 1, 000, 000. The
whole traffic in the groups could add up to 70 % of the whole
site. And, I should note that 70%
of traffic-- initial 240(with more 1000 subscribers) of more 25,
000 groups contribute-- sticks to the 28-distribution
rule.
And one more thing to be noted: all Douban groups are much less about
books/movies/music than about food and fashion and cosmetics.
Basically, a Douban group discussion
is about schmoozing about an interesting topic, in
some ways the same as a post forum or a BBS.
About who Douban users are
A Douban
survey suggests that:
1. 80% Douban users are under
26, 90% are under 30. It’s a sure sign that Douban users are younger than average Internet
users in China.
2. 50% users are students, 23% are company employees.
Analysis: average Douban user is more
well-educated than a Chinese Internet user.
Conclusion: Douban users are
mainly young and well-educated.
About the Douban
Truth
Picture that if Baidu Post
Forum has 70% of Baidu’s traffic,
then Baidu looks like a real search engine? The answer is obviously NOT. Douban is also the case.
The fact is: As I just said, Doban is
less about books. It’s the user behaviors as a big driving force that convert Douban into a group-like social networking
site. Douban is essentially nothing less than a
big post forum whose users just have good education
background.
Now, I’ve got a full answer to Douban traffic curve mystery.
Unfortunately, Abei has been blind about the mystery. Since
2005, Abei had been
working hard on new featured
services to attract more new users beyond
college/university students. However, the
new services barely worked, they
were still big magnets to the
student crowd because those services
catered well to the special
high tastes of this demographics
for books, movies and music. We
understand that because it also reminds us of a kind of
consumeristic mindset—“I have no
money, but I can pretend to be a petit
bourgeois hanging out at a classy community online where no one
knows if I have no money or not.”—when we were students.
Douban was unsurprisingly, easily
cosseted by the young-well-educated crowd. And the big media
coverage, plus students’ buzz, combined to give
Douban the growth
curve a big push.
However, when the the young-well-educated landed on Douban,
they just ended up talking about odds and ends, what they needed is
just a small group without too many JAVA applets or AJAX stuff.
They could give Abei’s sophisticated
“algorithm” ideas a short shrift as long as the simple groups were
created. And Abei himself was
absorbed in optimizations of
Douban’s products,
still ignorant of what the
exactly users wanted to get.
The predictable result is:
Abei was virtually
isolated from the psyche of the
users, both users and Abei got to a point
where they split over what new
attracting services Douban could offer, even
though they were bonded to
Douban. It’s signal
that the fanfare in 2005 was
gone forever, and Douban per se was almost
on the verge of a failed
innovation—most of users didn’t try
out other services, other than
Groups. Without the next pushing
force, the Douban
growth curve doubtlessly, predictably, went
flat.
A
quick flashback at the evolution of web in China shows us that
Douban is NOT an isolated case; the
young well-educated saved unsuccessfully Douban as much as Muzimei did for Blogcn and BlogChina, the same way Super Girls' Voice (the Chinese counterpart of
American Idol) helped Baidu post
forum; like Xu Jinglei is the life-saver of Sina blog, much as
Zhangyu did for Yuqoo(the Chinese equivalent of YouTube). The hidden gaming rule is like this:
Behind every great site there is a woman. And there will be the one
for Douban, it’s the Abei’s algorithm philoposhy could see; He’s trying to make that
women appear with practicing the philosophy, NOT
waiting.(the translator's note: Blogcn, BlogChina and Sina blog
are 3 big blog service providers (BSP) in China.)
Finally, I can boil this lengthy piece down to the real truth
about Douban: It’s
clustered schmoozing-the only thing Chinese
web users, regardless of education background, are addicted to
doing as part of their life at any social networking site from
Tianya to Baidu to Douban to
much more.
Something you need to
know...
About
Maitian (a.k.a.麦田): An
experienced Internet observer, Maitian has been keeping his eyes on online
communities and social networking sites in China. He is one of the
most influential Chinese tech bloggers. Along with others, he recently set up a
research panel--1cm Community Study
Panel(一厘米社区学习小组), a site dedicated to exploring the
featured websites, and publishing some high-quality articles about
the case studies--at MaaYee
community, an online community about IT/web
research.
He also blogs at
TechWeb, a tech community for Chinese
IT professionals. More is available at his blog : http://maitian.blog.techweb.com.cn/
About
Douban (豆瓣)
Found
by Yang Bo(杨勃,a.k.a.Abei)
on March 26th, 2005, Douban is a social networking site about book,
movie and music reviews. It’s considered to be the best Web2.0
example site in China. As of Novmber,
2006, Douban has more than 330, 000
registered users, according to Chinese Wikipedia
Douban on the
web:
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