After a few day of stuffing little red envelopes with lucky 'lai see' money and myself with dumplings and taking in the always outstanding HK Harbour fireworks it was a relief to catch something other than Year of the Pig fare and find 'Sage Brennan's THIS WEEK IN CHINA'.

His comment on the overwhelming prevalence of bulletin board systems BBS still dominating China's internet culture has motivated me to look further into the use of BBS's to cut thru the noise created by blogging and gaming to better appreciate where exactly consumer tastes & sensibilties lie.

After surfing a few that I found I'm in agreement with him [ that reading BBS's in China, that ] ..."It's one way to cope with an exploding market with little transparency and essentially zero consumer data."

Brennan goes onto say that, "The core group of BBS posters is a much sought-after demographic: call them China's alpha-customers. In general 20% of the people writing messages write about 80% of the messages. These are the early adopters of new mobile devices and other gadgets, the first to find new restaurants, the most passionate fans of the hottest TV shows or pop songs."

I would reckon that this would hold true for businesses looking to monetize video search with pre or post roll ads. 

I also signed up at JLM Pacific Epoch, which covers China's emerging media, entertainment and technology industries, to get their periodic industry updates and free newletters on what is happening media-wise in China.