96% of All Page Views in China are Local – Just 4% Away From North Korea

A researcher at Harvard University has calculated that “96 percent of all page views in China are to web sites hosted within China.” This points to both a thriving web scene in China – where you can shop on Taobao whilst watching videos on Youku – but also to the extent of web controls in the country.

Harvard fellow Hal Roberts – who specializes in internet filtering circumvention, web surveillance, and hack attacks – came up with the number by combining Google AdPlanner’s list of page views on China’s top 250 websites with Harvard’s own databases of IP address registrations. There’s always a possible margin of error, but 96 percent indicates the great extent of the parochial nature of the Chinese web.

Of course, the notorious Great Firewall plays its part, albeit in a totally unquantifiable way. Not even the brightest of researchers could say for sure if Youku would be so dominant if YouTube were not blocked; or if Google Plus could topple Weibo in China if it weren’t hit with Net Nanny’s ban hammer in just its first week of existence.

There’s also the even more sinister element of intimidation and the risk of arrest inherent in the web here. The report notes that, “There is no need to launch a DDoS attack … when agents of the offended country can simply knock on the door.”

Roberts himself is spilt on whether it’s the strict controls, or the variety of choice, that makes the Chinese web so internalized, almost to the point of being an intranet. On his blog, Roberts writes:

The extremely high proportion of local web traffic in China may be the result of the success of the Chinese government in blocking the international sites, like Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger, that are generally the biggest destination in other countries. Or it might be because Chinese people like to read content written in Chinese by other Chinese about Chinese topics run by Chinese people. It is likely some combination of the two factors. But the end result is the same.

There are still Chinese web users who try to ‘leap over the wall’ – mostly, I’d say, for innocent purposes, such as checking back on their old Facebook accounts, or seeing what’s so funny on YouTube – but authorities seem hell-bent on stopping such evasions. Sadly, that 96 percent figure could well go up if the Harvard teams decides to re-run its tests next year. Despite a thriving web and tech scene in China, there’s not much global thinking going on.

[Source: Hal Roberts of Harvard; via Shanghaiist]