RockYou Looks Past China's Internet Users
China has the attention of RockYou, one of the earliest developers of widgets for social networks. But it isn’t China’s nearly 400 million Internet users that are the main draw–it’s the nation’s developers.
RockYou CTO and co-founder Jia Shen said at a social game summit in Beijing Friday that the company, which plans to expand its presence in Asia, is “actively” looking at acquisition targets in China rather than more users because social games are less lucrative here than in other markets, mostly due to a lack of openness of Chinese social networking sites.
According to Shen, companies that operate social networking Web sites in China, including Tencent Holdings Ltd., have huge user numbers, but demand an average of 40 percent to 50 percent of revenue from the games distributed on their Web sites, or more than is standard in other markets. And though a higher rate of Chinese users pay to play the games, they spend much less, he said.
