My China Market Entry Advice To Facebook And Twitter
Don’t bother trying to come into China directly. Your services are far too subversive to be approved in the current environment. Even if you were allowed into the country, you would be chewed apart by large, scrappy local competitors like Oak Pacific, Kaixin001, Sina and Tencent. And the ethical and public relations minefields would be too great a distraction for your young companies.
Instead, provide free VPN and other filter-bypassing services. A meaningful number of Chinese users will flock to your products if they can access you easily. You will then have a decent base of Chinese users which, given your sophisticated ad-targeting capabilities, you will eventually be able to monetize, with a much higher margin than if you were operating in China.
I understand the Expo 2010 US organizing committee has burned bridges in Silicon Valley, but please also consider sponsoring the US pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010. You represent some of the best that American offers, and you should be showing off to China and the world.
Related posts:
Google, Twitter, china
i would actually like to see several of the US-based companies that are sitting on deep war chests put forth funds to set up VPN and other solutions/workarounds. Whereas it was at one time the responsibility of the US Government to set up broadcasting towers along unfriendly borders to broadcast subversive messages with VOA, that is no longer prudent, whereas companies such as Google could put forth a long term effort to defeat the walls of chinese censorship. Free market vs. Totalitarian government. it would be a good use of funds.
[...] China watcher, Bill Bishop, proposed a different strategy that might be more worth Facebook’s [...]