China Search Daily

265.com and Google is another hot keyword in my blog. “265.com Google” the keyword kept bringing my blog traffics for more than one year.

What’s amazing story between this two brands. Guess google china really learned a lot from china website like 265.com. I mean both the style and the domain strategy.

That’s why Google has it’s directory page in China, which looks wired for western internet user, and has a short domain www.g.cn.

Every international brand came across localization problems during they first steps in China. Google couldnt by pass all the problems over night or by technology.

Whether Google bought 265.com or not? It doesnt matter. When you look at www.265.com, the search box there will first bring you to google.

That tells everything.

Who is 265.com?

I have posted about 265.com and its founder Mr. Cai before.

265.com is regarded as a grass-root legend in china internet market. They maybe the simplest site in China. I said they were the teenage yahoo, like a directory or navigation site.

A similar website called hao123.com had already merged by Baidu two year ago. After that, IDG VC invested into 265.com, Google followed the coming year.

Both hao123.com and 265.com had contribute huge traffic for both Baidu and Google for since 2004. The most valuabale asset for these website are traffice and massive amount of faithful internet users. A hugh amount of chinese internet user make 265.com as their homepage at the computers.

Now, a little bird told me today,Google extend its investment and merge 265.com into its china branch. No one commeted about that so far.

Baidu bought hao123.com at Sep 2004, with 50 million RMB ( about 6 million USD ) and some stocks of Baidu. That was really a big deal at that year. And the story of hao123.com and its founder Mr Li Xingping became a legend.

IDGVC invested about 20 million RMB ( about 2.5 million USD ) to 265.com at the end of 2004. And Goolge followed up and invested +10 million to 265.com at the beginning of 2006. 265.com and its founder Mr Cai Wensheng was another legend.

Both hao123 and 265 are very simple and common-looks site, initiated by their only founder. Yes, Mr Lixingping did everything related to hao123.com almost by himself. So did Mr Cai Wensheng and his 265.com.

Their Alexa traffic ranking are all among the top 100 at the year of 2004.

They are not portal or search engine. They look as simple as just only one page. We call 265.com and hao123.com as sites navigation site, or url navigation site.

They simply list all the popular site’s name with live link at just one page. But most of the internet users make them as their home page.

Why? Because it’s hard for those Chinese users to remember the urls with English characters. For them, to remember the url and type it at the browser are very challenging to them.

But they know Chinese, so one page with a directory for site name in Chinese and with live link is very convenient to them.

265 and hao123 did try very hard to modify and update their directory, and to make more clear and user-friendly categories.

Because their user friendly, they both occupied the largest share in Chinese home page market. And they brought remarkable traffics to portals and search engines. I believed that ,3 years ago, still a lager percentage of Chinese internet users got to know sites like google from them.

Traffic and user royalty are their core value. They benefited from the sort of adsense from baidu and other searh engines in china since 2003/2004. Which meant they started to turn out cash from their traffics.

Hao123 started from 1999, and 265 started from 2003. Mr Li is pretty young and Mr Cai is still at his 30s now.

Mr Li is enjoying his life Guangdong province. After baidu’s deal with hao123, Mr Cai and his 265.com grew up very fast, now became the leader and hero in Chinese internet industry, especially for those so-called independent webmasters. Thousands of creative small sites and their webmasters/founders were well-connected by MR Cai and his 265.com. He is a “traffic driver” and a “traffic broker”, because he had developed an traffic exchange center (TEC) at his 265.com. At 2004 and 2005, every of the Chinese search engines, B2Bs and B2Cs benefit a lot from this TEC.

At 2005 and 2006, the 1st and 2nd Chinese webmaster conferences were launched by Mr Cai and his partner.

More legends are coming soon.