US Website Moves To Traditional Media, Chinese Companies Already There

A Techcrunch story about wedding site The Knot buying a magazine company wondered "if we are going to see more Web-buy-print deals". While this may be a new phenomenon in the US, severalChinese companies have used this model. Wedding preparation and home decoration community site Liba.com has a very successful online storefront model, but has also been publishing a magazine since December 2006 and acquired another in November of last year. Another company, Co-op Land Corporation, also targeting the home decoration crowd, launched its website www.E-jjj.com in 2000 and has been publishing magazines since 2001. Co-op Land also plans to launch a TV channel in 2008 (See PE's interview with Co-op Land here).

From the broader perspective, almost all companies looking to make some money in China have to use the online/offline model. Job search company 51job (Nasdaq: JOBS), still makes over half its revenue from its offline recruitment newspaper. Travel booking services providers Ctrip (Nasdaq: CTRP) and eLong (LONG) are essentially call center businesses that also happen to have (pretty bad) websites. All the game companies rely on offline sales channels-such as Internet cafes-to get their prepaid game cards in the hands of gamers. Baidu and Alibaba have thousands of salespeople blanketing small and medium enterprises (SME) hawking their marketing platforms. And a lot of "e-commerce" transactions are completed using the cash on delivery payment method.