Paul Denlinger

Investing In China's Online Gaming Sector

I did not single out Shanda for criticism, I directed my criticism to the whole sector. I reaffirm my opinion that all gaming companies are overly risky businesses and guarantee stable growth, especially when there is more steady growth and return in the A-shares market.

As a matter of fact, I have stopped following the online gaming companies just for this reason.

And for your information, I was in involved in arranging Shanda's seed-round funding.

请你先看清楚再作评论。

Paul Denlinger

Investing In China's Online Gaming Sector

When a retail investor invests in a Chinese game developer and distributor, they are essentially investing in the management's ability to develop and/or distribute a hit game title. This story made a lot of sense when Shanda went public in 2004, but in 2007, it makes no sense because it is too risky and time-sensitive.

With the rapid rise of China's domestic A-share market in 2006, one can make MUCH better returns on a steady basis, with a lot less risk than the online gaming market.

China's New Obsession with Blogs and How Companies Can Benefit

This report on the BBC website says that most bloggers write about personal experiences and technology. This also applies to Chinese bloggers, and explains why it is so difficult to monetize blogging from the advertisers' point of view. To read the article, visit: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/te...

China's New Obsession with Blogs and How Companies Can Benefit

The simple truth is that although blogs are an excellent media for communications, there is virtually no way for anyone, except for a few astute individuals, to monetize them. That has been the case in the US, and it is likely to repeat in China.

Since the commercialization of media is not as pervasive in China as in the US, there have been many disputes about who owns the revenue from advertising for the few popular blogs. This was why Xu Jinglei took her blog off the Sina network.

For the service providers who provide blogging tools, blogs provide valuable real estate which ads can be run on. The most outstanding success in this area has been Google's twin massive revenue-generating services, Adwords and Adsense. The winners are Sina, Sohu, Netease and Tencent. These companies are able to digest the huge ad budgets being thrown their way by ad agencies.

But ad agencies themselves are an old-world business whose revenue structure is under assault, as is attested to by WPP's Martin Sorrel in this quote: www.ft.com/cms/s/89c1d...

The simple fact is that the Internet is bound to change the rules, and that Google is the one company which is best positioned to lead: richardbrandt.blogs.co...

Because Baidu is perceived as a Chinese company and is protected by the Chinese government, in much the same way as Sina is, it will be a leader instead of Google.

Then, any ad buyer will have a full set of advertising and information tools at his fingertips, enabling him to make all of his ad buying decisions. There will no longer be any intermediaries. Read here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...