As written before, I inherited a pretty large Chinese website (today 150k uniques) and I am trying to learn, monitor and hopefully manage some parts of the marketing at some time later. I really love doing this and even if it is at this point not too ‘web analytics’ related, it is so much fun learning and understanding another culture (especially when it comes with your job).
I’ve been all over Asia within the last 10 years, but China is again different from India, Malaysia or Indonesia and understanding the (business) culture is key to understand how the web business works. Here 5 things, that I’ve learned so far:
1. Chinese developers love Gmail, but don’t use Google (market share only about 20%)
2. A lot of large websites run on a .com domain. Domains usually include numbers e.g. 58.com. Short domains are very valuable b/c people visit them on their mobile.
3. Skype is not very popular. MSN and QQ are more common
4. 886 means Good Bye on an IM, 7456 means I’am angry
5. 9494: “That’s the way it is”
6. orz: “I’m tired”, “I’m fed up” or “Oh my God!” (often in shock and awe)
7. Google Analytics Chinese version is blocked in China (so use the english version)
8. Baidu has a PPC advertising platform (but not in another language than chinese)
9. Keep your Chinese website clean of political or non-appropriate content or you might get kicked
10. There is maybe 1 Apple computer in China 
