For China's Web Portals, Controversy Sells

By JULIET YE
February 28, 2008; Page B2

China's Web portals thrive on debates over such scandals as 'Tigergate,' which started with a photograph of a South China tiger posted online. 

HONG KONG -- In the world of China's fast-expanding Internet, the fortunes of some of the industry's most important players -- the portals -- depend on the spread of often obscure online obsessions. So the sites aren't leaving things to chance.

Take the scandal known in China as "Tigergate." In the fall, a farmer in China's Shaanxi province spied a wild South China tiger, believed to be extinct, and snapped a picture of it -- or so he said. The photo spread like wildfire on the Chinese Internet, drawing self-styled citizen reporters, panels of academic experts and even government officials into a debate about whether it was real or not.

 
China's Web portals thrive on debates over such scandals as 'Tigergate,' which started with a photograph of a South China tiger posted online.
One government official's tiger blog alone was visited more than a million times. Some people who suspected the photo was fake became "tiger fighters." "Tiger protectors" insisted the image and the tiger were authentic.

Presiding over it all were the Web portals, which thrive on the constant and careful fanning of debate. Tigergate is one of several Chinese Internet scandals that have stirred attention recently. Sexually explicit photos featuring a Chinese rap star circulated on China's Internet, causing a major uproar. Another scandal emerged over a doctored picture of antelope blissfully coexisting with a controversial new railway line to Tibet.

It has become a predictable pattern: China's portals amplify and orchestrate the incidents for public consumption, driving traffic to their sites.

"After Netizens started the discussion, Web portals such as Netease followed up and played the key role," Internet critic Hong Bo says. "This is the Chinese-style Internet community."

Business for China's big portals is small but growing fast. Their total revenue hit 12.35 billion yuan ($1.73 billion) last year, up from 10 billion yuan in 2006. Approximately one-third of the portals' total 2007 revenue came from online advertising. The top four Chinese portals -- Sina Corp., Sohu.com Inc. and Netease.com Inc., all listed on Nasdaq Stock Market, and Hong Kong-listed Tencent Holdings Ltd. -- together accounted for just more than three-quarters of that revenue. Total revenue is expected to reach 16.19 billion yuan this year and 21.33 billion yuan next year, according to the Data Centre of the China Internet, a research and consulting organization.

In October, Sina.com ran a blog by a government official to defend the farmer, Zhou Zhenglong, and the local government, which had been accused of fueling the tiger rumor to spur tourist visits. In mid-November, Cameraunion.com, a professional photography portal, posted an older, commercial photo of a tiger that looked a lot like the farmer's, casting doubt on his claim. Shortly after, Netease scored an eyeball-grabbing coup by posting 40 digital photos of the tiger, purportedly taken by the farmer.

American portals like to kick up a storm, too, and Yahoo Inc.'s message boards, for example, can be lively. They aren't key drivers of traffic the way message boards are for China's portals. U.S. portals enjoy a more reliable feed of news and entertainment content to draw advertisers. In China, portals depend on a more splintered revenue stream, peddling everything from messaging systems such as Tencent's popular QQ to online games that draw huge numbers of users.

Shortly after it posted its 40 photos of the tiger, Netease convened a panel of experts to evaluate them, including the China Photographer Association, the Huxia Evidence Identification Centre, a zoologist, a detective, professors from Zhongshan University and the Forensic Science Association of China. Sina, Sohu.com and Netease all dispatched their own reporting staffs to cover the latest tiger news.

All three started "special bulletin" pages about Tigergate to drive traffic. Online community sites such as Tianya, Cameraunion and Baidu Post Bar ran discussion forums. The discussion site Xici.net took a Chinese expression_r about viewing a wild fight from a safe distance, "to sit on the mountain and watch the tigers fight" and named its tiger-discussion room "South China Tiger sits on the mountain and watches the people fight."

Write to Juliet Ye at juliet.ye@wsj.com

以上报道见华尔街日报2008年2月28日B2版，在报道华南虎事件的同时，揭露了中国各门户网站的下流无耻。在关于华南虎事件的部分，记者提到了周老师的名字，该报道的最后一句：“虎坐山上观人斗”。

另：另有外媒关于华南虎事件的最新报道，明天需要核实一下。如果确实，预计该报道中会有如下内容：“照片有变化（与网上的照片相比）。”