Wen-Wei Wang and Matt Roberts of Abang.com

About.com, the wildly successful blog aggregation purchased by The New York Times in 2005,
With ad revenues increasing 29.7 percent to $67 million for this year to date, About.com has the fastest growing ad revenue of any part of the New York Times Group. A Dec 18 press release shows all other divisions of the NYTCO facing advertising declines.

quietly launched a Chinese version of the site, abang.com.
The China entry is About.com’s first wholly-owned international version. Their Japan site,Allabout.co.jp, is run under a licensing agreement.

This posting covers the business, while the posting here talks about the content.

A launch team with experience in China and at About.com
The launch has been led by Matt Roberts, the general manager and longtime veteran of the China media scene, and Wen-Wei Wang, who worked at About.com for seven years before signing on as vice president for technology for About.com’s China launch.

have been operating in stealth mode for nearly a year
Roberts opened the office in January 2007, launched the beta version in November and has spent the last year recruiting bloggers – called “guides” in the About lingo – and fine tuning the site in beta form. The layout for the Chinese version is considerably different.

while building content.
The site now has a staff or around two dozen along with several thousand articles written by 80 guides. The guides each cover topics within seven categories: Fashion, Food, Health, Hobbies, Pets, Digital, Travel. For comparison, the US site has more than 600 guides.

The name “about.com” would not work in China
Choosing the name required balancing the value of the brand name internationally with making Chinese feel ownership of the site, Roberts said. “We could have called ourselves About.cn, but wanted to show we are not a foreign Internet company merely translating our content for China,” Roberts said. “Our users need to feel ownership of the site, so we need a local name and local feel.” The main nod to the About name comes in the use of the same graphic red dot.

so they used Abang, which implies “community of helpers”.
The name Abang was derived from the Chinese character “bang”, which means group or community. “Bang” is also part of the character “Bang1 Zhu4″, meaning help and “Bang1 Shou3″ meaning helper. The “a” makes reference to the southern Chinese colloquial honorific when addressing a friend.

For China, About.com’s unique selling points will be:

1- Transparent statistics
Unlike the vast majority of Chinese sites, Abang will offer advertisers reliable third party statistics to measure an ad campaign’s effectiveness. The Chinese Internet currently has such little confidence in statistics that most major sites actually sell ads by the hour, as discussed here. Abang will start by using allyes.com to provide stats.

2- Editorial integrity
Unlike many Chinese sites – including results on search giant Baidu – About will not mix advertising and editorial content.
“All ads will be clearly marked,” Roberts said. “We do not want confusion.” While guides may be tempted to accept bribes for mentioning a product, Roberts said the US site has found that the passion and pride of being a recognized expert is greater than the temptation to accept endorsements. He expects the same in China.

Is about.com censored by the government of China?
About.com abides by all draconian measures that apply to Internet companies operating in China (ie: reporting people who post content that makes the government unhappy, etc), but Roberts said the site sidesteps the issue by its very nature. About.com in China will focus on lifestyles issues that do not touch topics that make China’s government sensitive, such as politics and religion. Since About.com runs content explicitly written by their own employees and approves all comments before they go up, there is little risk of anonymous content that upsets the Internet police. By contrast, the US version of About.com features numerous guides writing about politics and religious issues.

Why not start the site yourself?
Since Roberts knows more about China’s Internet space than most, I asked why he didn’t just start an About.com-style site on his own, without seeking cooperation from the US-based company. Roberts said that while the look and feel of the China site may be different, About.com has provided key insights, engines and “secret sauce” to make the site work in China.

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