2014年10月30日星期四

Baidu Tieba, Otaku and China’s Post-90s’ View on Consumption

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 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:
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