It has been revealed this week that in 2010 China experienced a 41 percent drop in the number of websites as compared to the previous year – that’s according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
The reported drop in the number of websites is likely the result of tightened controls by the Chinese government, particularly against pornographic websites – a fate which befell China’s recent red-light blogger, who now finds himself in jail. Although CASS, a state-financed think-tank, doesn’t take that angle.
Liu Ruisheng from CASS told the BBC that:
Despite the declining number of sites, the number of web pages had risen to 60 billion during 2010 – a 79% increase on the previous year.
In other words, those sites that have not been subject to a crackdown by the government have produced even more content on the web. The spike in content could be explained by the recent boom in microblogs which has added hundreds of millions of new pages. Also increasingly popular are vaguely newsy, viral and scandalous stories that netizens seem to eat up.
As more Chinese content is now being produced, CASS also revealed that the Chinese language is now the second most widely-used language in the world on the Internet. It has been independently verified that China now has an Internet penetration rate of 34 percent amongst its populace in 2010, and that it’s growing at a rate far quicker than the English-language web.
Of course, the real news on that subject will be when Chinese surpasses English on the web – which is almost certainly going to happen later this decade.
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