Author: Lei YANG

Almost all Chinese SNS has the same layout, and similar features. However, recently one SNS website aiming to make friends (dating) is a little bit different.

Background info: taobao.com accounts for around 82% of e-commerce in China, and people called commodity there as ‘treasure’, therefore, ‘treasure’ is the symbol of commodity on the Internet business.In Chinese, the handwriting and pronunciation of ‘treasure’ is the same as ‘baby’, in pinyin, it’s ‘bao bei’, and taobao’s bao represents ’bao bei’, therefore, Chinese give taobao’s tao the meaning of ’looking for’ as a verb. 

51taonan.com, a ‘feminist’ SNS website which is the supermarket only for women, all ‘bao bei’ are men. 51 in Chinese means ‘I will’, ‘tao’ still means ‘looking for’, and ‘nan’ means ‘men’. It’s in fact the dating site, but the manner of dating is that women choose their ‘bao bei’ and put them into cart. The layout is friendly to find men, like, on the left column at homepage for women, there are’bao bei’ at the same city, and ‘find bao bei’ at top banner which leads to advanced search. There are still lots of interactive features and feeds like normal SNS website, but more focus on looking for, interacting with, and dating with men.

The site is still new, its slogan is ‘we are not looking for men, but looking for romantic’, which tells us, the more fanny thing is about the precess but not only the result. It has been released at the second half of Jan this year, and has now 26K+ daily average IP, and 448K+ daily average PV according to alexa.

More information about this site, please refer to: http://www.globaltimes.cn/www/english/metro-beijing/lifestyle/education&careers/2010-02/507799.html