1. Baidu
Post-90s Insight Report
At the Baidu World Conference on September 3, 2014, Baidu Post-90s Insight Report[Anon n.d.] was
released by Baidu’s Consumer Business Group. Apart from statistics from Baidu’s products, such as
Baidu Index, Baidu Video and Baidu Music , this report was also based on a
survey of 7000 Baidu Tieba users. Analysing those data and questionnaires, the
insight report summarized China’s post-90 people’s views on family, love,
friendship, consumption and employment.
2.
Post-90s,
the Generation just Walk onto the Stage of Society
Similar to ‘Y generation’ in western countries, ‘post-90s’
is a term to describe people born in 1990s in China, who are the second
generation born after the implementation of China’s one-child policy. There are
some stereotypes that post-90s are egoist, and even selfish. According to the
population census result published in 2010[Anon n.d.], about 13%
people in China are post-90s, fewer than post-80s (17.14%) and post-70s (16.15%).
Post-90s grow up with China’s dramatic economic growth and urbanization. By the
end of 2014, the ages of post-90 generation should be between 14 and 24.
Typically, people in this age group include most of high school students,
college students and people just enter workforce and start their professional
careers.
Moreover, post-90s is the first generation grow up
with Internet, as the amount of China’s internet user start to increase rapidly
in early 2000s. They are digital native, as well as internet native. 2013 China’s Youth Internet Behaviour Report[Anon 2014a] indicated that 41.5% of
China’s netizens, which are 256 million, are under 25 years old.
3.
Baidu
Tieba, Socializing the Searching Engine
Baidu is the NO.1 searching engine and most visited
website in mainland China[Anon 2014b][Anon n.d.]. In
December 2003, it launched its first community product, Baidu Tieba.
Socializing the searching is Baidu’s innovation. Baidu
hope when people input a key word to its search engine, they will get not only
related websites, but also a place to discuss about the key word. The place is
Tieba. Baidu’s former chief product designer Yu Jun said the purpose to design
Tieba is to build an online discussion platform integrated into the searching
engine; to gather people who are interested in the same topic, so that they can
share their interest and help each other conveniently[程东升 2009]. “Born for
interest” is Tieba’s slogan. Now there are 8 million bars in Tieba, and almost
100 million new posts every day.
Basically, Tieba is a forum, but it has many
differences from traditional BBS. For example:
· People
with same interest can easily set up a bar (forum) to discuss, without complex
application procedures.
· The
topic of a bar could be very specific.
· People
who want to talk about a certain topic can easily find the corresponding bar by
searching the topic.
· It
is more stable. Due to the network effect, people may move from one social
network site (or IM application) to a new one, but they can always find a bar
for their new interests in Tieba.
Baidu owns over 40,000 patents. Method and system for network community and searching combination[俞军 et al. 2007] suggests
Tieba’s most basic mechanism: users can see the related bar when they search
for a key word, and how to establish a new bar if there is no exciting bar
discussing the key word. A key word filter is included in this mechanism. As
there so many sub-forums in Tieba, and new bars may emerge every day, Baidu uses the technique stated in patent [侯震宇 et al. 2010] to
dynamically categorize and sort those bars. As the largest forum in Chinese,
Tieba use [尹佳 et al. 2012] to
detecting junk posts. [刘栩 et al. 2011] is about a
function, that recommend Tieba users another users to chat with. Among other
patents related to Tieba, [梁广耀 2014],[唐才林 2011] and[朱建庭 2013] are about
user-experience, [张旭东 2013] is about
safety and privacy and some are for the
Tieba system, such as [邵小波 and 阮 2009] and [侯震宇 et al. 2012].
Tieba’s Influence on Post-90s
Many results in Baidu Post-90s Insight Report are
actually from the survey of Tieba user. According to figure 1, however, only 19.2%
high school netizens and 30% college netizens use forums or BBSs, the
penetrations are much lower than those of Weibo.
Figure
1: Internet Applications’ Penetrations Among Netizens Under 25[Anon 2014a]
|
Application
|
High
school students
|
College
Students
|
Non-students
|
Total
netizens under 25
|
Total
netizen
|
|
Instant
message
|
91.9%
|
97.7%
|
79.9%
|
91.1%
|
86.2%
|
|
Weibo
|
59.7%
|
76.7%
|
53.5%
|
54.3%
|
45.5%
|
|
E-mail
|
35.0%
|
68.7%
|
39.8
|
37.6%
|
42.0%
|
|
Forum/BBS
|
19.2%
|
30.6%
|
21.2%
|
21.4%
|
19.5%
|
|
Blog/personal
sites
|
80.7
|
86.5%
|
83.0%
|
76.7%
|
70.7%
|
Even though many post-90s do not use Tieba, they are
influenced cyber-culture originating from the discussion in Tieba. For
instance, almost all high school students and college students knows some web
slangs, such as “Gao Fu Shuai”, which are firstly used by Tieba users. Those slangs are not only popular among
post-90s, they are even used by official media, such as CCTV, more and more
frequently. Besides, some subcultures in
Tieba, “Diao Si” culture for example, also affect the way post-90s think, as
well as their values.
4.
Otaku,
the Tag Post-90s Give to Themselves.
In the Baidu’s Insight Report, most post-90s Tieba
users describe themselves as otaku. Otaku is a term from Japan, describing
people who have obsession with animation, comic, video game and entertainer,
prefer for indoor activities, have high reconition of self-values and love to
participate in subjects of their own interests [Niu et al. 2012]. Usually,
otakus are enthusiastic about animation, comics and games and idols. Baidu also
indicated that the top 3 most searched topic for post-90s users are exactly
online games, entertainers and animation. In the history of Tieba, the bars for
World of Warcraft (online game), League of Legends (online game), Chris Li
(Chinese singer),EXO (K-pop band), TVXQ (K-pop band), Naruto (Japanese
animation) and One Piece (Japanese animation) are some of the most popular and
influential bars.
Tieba has a great network effect on them otaku. Otaku
enrich contents in Tieba significantly. Tieba also boom those subcultures’
spread and development in China. Some bars become a platform for comic
creators, independent game developers and another otaku content producer to
show their works to more people. Sometimes their supporters’ or opponents’
discussion and even debating can be a kind of re-creation, producing new
subculture phenomenon. Many people would love to participate in creating new
online phenomenon, so they may be more active in TIeba.
5.
Otakus’
Consumer Behaviour
Online games, comics, animations and idols have
successfully attracted more and more Chinese post-90s. In japan, the origin of
Otakus, this group is no longer a niche market. As early as 10 years ago, there
have been 2.85 million Japanese otakus who spent reaching 290 billion yen on
their hobbies every year [9].
Those kind of people may spent a large amount of their
disposable income to what they love, and they are usually very loyal customers.
Their consumption behaviour is driven by their passion in pursing their ideals,
the price elasticity upon consumption often declines to the minimum level and
they tend to hurry to extremes, pouring almost all of their disposable income
into such pursuit.
6. Post-90s’
View on Consumption
Baidu
summarize post-90s’ view on consumption as “pay for what they love”. Which
means many post-90s internet users may spend many money in popular things, as
mentioned before, animation et.al. A case given by Baidu is exactly about a
typical otaku, who use low-end mobile and cheap bag, but buy many expensive
anime-products. Baidu has also notice this group of people and the market
behind them.
In this
June, at the annual “election” event of popular idol group AKB48, more than
35,000 votes from fans in China pushed Mayu Watanabe to victory for the first
time with a total of 159,854 votes[Anon n.d.]. The whole event was organized by
her fans in Tieba, and completed in just a few days. It was estimated those
votes may cost over 3 million RMB.
Those kind
of shopping is for high level demands, such as self-actualization. They are not
only buying anime-products and voting idols, they are pursuing their dreams. Post-90s
are usually idealist spiritually, but many of them feel hopeless to achieve their
dream, under China’s current issue of “social compaction”[Anon n.d.]. The success of their idols or a
comic figure, could give them a lot of encouragement.
Over 80
percent interviewee said once they find something they love, they would make
their best effort to get it, no matter by getting a part-time job or saving
money. Elderly Chinese grenrations may think the idea eating instant nooddles
to save money for a concert or anime-product is crazy. But for post-90
generation, this kind of behavior is understandable.
At the
same time, post-90s Tieba users suggested they would not easily affected by
Ads, especially traditional commercials. Instead of brand, they care more about
products’ quality and price better. In Baidu’s report, we should also notice
that post-90s love be out in public. They want to highlight their
individualities.
Reference:
Anon, 2014a. 2013年中国青少年上网行为调查报告,
Anon,
2014b. 2014中国网民搜索行为研究报告,
中国互联网信息中心.
Anon,
AKB48渡边麻友登顶
中国粉丝左右日本娱乐大选_网易娱乐.
Anon,
Alexa - baidu.com Site Overview.
Anon,
中国2010年人口普查资料.
Anon,
百度《90后洞察报告》：大数据解读90后.
Anon,
马佳佳万科演讲.
Niu, H.-J.,
Chiang, Y.-S. and Tsai, H.-T., 2012. An Exploratory
Study of the Otaku Adolescent Consumer. Psychology and Marketing,
29(10), pp.712–725.
侯震宇 et al., 2012. 网络留言系统及留言过滤方法.
侯震宇 et al., 2010. 网络社区动态目录的构建系统和方法.
俞军 et al., 2007. Method and system
for network community and searching combination.
刘栩, 杨用, 纪鹏程, 罗亮 and 舒迅,
2011. 社区网络中确定用户匹配度并撮合用户聊天的方法和设备.
唐才林,
2011. 一种通过用户设备在网页中进行多按钮提交的方法和设备.
尹佳, 帅帅, 方勇, 舒迅 and 袁聃,
2012. 一种用于社区网络中检测垃圾帖子的方法与设备.
张旭东,
2013. 网络爬虫识别方法.
朱建庭,
2013. 基于二维码的登录控制方法和系统.
梁广耀,
2014. 瀑布流式图片动态呈现的方法及装置.
程东升,
2009. 李彦宏的百度世界, DynoMedia Inc.
邵小波 and 阮龙,
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