"Syntology" - notes on the Chinese Internet

Hi dear 儿 ! Since 1999 I have been living in China, and somewhere since 2007 I have been more or less actively working with the Chinese Internet (and this is not only your favorite Taobao , believe me).

Everyone has heard about Internet censorship in China , ruthless competition, supersonic copying of technology, but in practice, of Russian companies, few have come across this. You just have to listen to podcasts and interviews on Echo of Moscow or Finam FM, in which top managers of large Russian Internet companies comment on any events from the Chinese Internet and at the same time give out so many “lulz” and factoids that it would be time for me to collect them on quotes and talk in the program "These Russians" on CCTV .
')
However, I could not bear it any longer and decided to publish my notes on the Chinese Internet called " Syntology ". Two articles have already been published, I started with basic questions, but in the future I am going to dig deeper (features of Chinese web design, Internet business and e-commerce in China, etc.). So welcome, or 欢迎 光临 !

Small excerpt

Choosing a memorable domain for the Chinese

For a start, the simple truth is that the Chinese know the Latin alphabet very poorly and remember it. In general, in China, the situation with foreign languages ​​is no better than ours. We are saved only by the fact that the Cyrillic alphabet has relatively more in common with the Latin alphabet than the Chinese characters. Add to this that, on average, Russians can at least somehow read the Latin alphabet and put "a be ce ce" into consonant syllables. To the Chinese, the Latin alphabet seems to be quite alien and unreadable. This means that for the Chinese, remembering some Latin domain may be a little easier than you remembering a few unfamiliar hieroglyphs.

Therefore, it is not surprising that domains consisting entirely or partially of numbers are so popular in China, because numbers are easy to dictate and remember.

Another confirmation of this simple truth is advertising, which often does not indicate the advertiser’s site at all, but shows / says something like “search in a search engine ...” and then the name or slogan of the advertiser.

Lyrical digression

A funny case was in my practice, when a certain company spent a lot of money to hang all Beijing’s taxis with its advertisement. The advertisement indicated the site’s address, a bright slogan and a list of services. But the competitor of this company started off, did search engine optimization on his website and bought ads in Baidu2, using the slogan of the first company, having stolen most of their clients from them. After all, when a passenger got into a taxi, became interested in advertising, he remembered a bright slogan, not an incomprehensible website address, and then he looked for more information on a smartphone or computer through Baida, where the top five results belonged to our hapless company’s competitors.

囧

Foreshadowing some of the questions I will say: the format (paragraphs) and the name are a small tribute to Tema Lebedev and Maxim Spiridonov, whose “Kovodstvo” / “Runetology” I read and listen to for a long time.

_{Thanks for the illustration Alexey Iorsh!}