Anyone have insight as to why Snapchat is blocked in China but Snow isn't? Is Snow just currently under the radar and will likely suffer the same fate?
My random guess is that the last I heard - Snapchat was still on AppEngine. The first results on a Google search (so I don't know with any confidence if it's true) say that the appspot domain is blocked in China.
"Our competitive advantage is Chinese regulations blocking a social network and some domestic market filters" - One can change overnight and two can be pretty easily matched by a deep pocketed competitor who wants to enter your market. I could see these places being ghost towns in 2 or 3 years.
In 2 or 3 years they'll have the network effect locked down. Chat apps rise and fall between generations ICQ -> AOL -> Text -> Snapchat, but it's rare for a similar product to steal a user base in that kind of market. My understanding is that many Asian countries look to Korea and Japan for fashion and pop culture so this may be the gateway to the rest of E and SE Asia.
Yeah! And on top of it, none of the western social networks have been able to crack the chinese market yet. Wechat/Weibu etc are popular with millions of users. So no deep pocketed company can crack the market easily.
Chinese regulations blocking a social network are unlikely to change overnight. It was characterized as "protectionism" elsewhere, but Chinese blocks are generally targeted at social networks. They worry less about whether the company is foreign, and more about whether it allows Chinese people to talk with foreigners.
This is incorrect. They are much more worried about Chinese people talking to each other than talking to foreigners. Quora is not blocked in China because its mostly Chinese arguing with foreigners, where Chinese are a pretty nationalistic lot when it comes to external interactions. But get two Chinese talking together, and the conversation can quite quickly move to rebellion.
So the gov wants to maintain control over Chinese interactions with each other, hence any major site in Chinese will get blocked immediate (as soon as Quora allows for Chinese content and it becomes popular, it will be blocked in favor of a harmonized Zhihu).
There are many heads in the government. Some are worried about control, these guys are the ones who first started using the GFW to its full potential. The protectionism comes later when they realized that blocking out foreign sites had the side effect of blocking out foreign competitors. Once that cat was let out of the bag, tons of Chinese internet startups popped up to take advantage of a uniquely protected market, and the government liked this outcome a lot...even if censorship disappeared tomorrow, they might still enjoy the protectionism, but the bottleneck right now is definitely censorship. Or to say, they might keep censorship around only as an excuse to block out foreign competitors without explicitly breaking WTO rules.
Internet companies that don't enable rebellious interactions between Chinese citizens are perfectly accepted...e.g. LinkedIn. Note also that Chinese social media tech, even very successful ones, have had absolutely no significant penetration outside of their protected market...not Myanmar, not Cambodia, none of China's next door neighbors, nor Taiwan or Hong Kong. There are stuck in their own ecosystem, with those that do get to compete with foreign companies, like Alibaba, doing much better outside of China.
Line Corp. Has also developed a product call Egg, which has similar features without the social network. Perhaps in anticipation of regulatory changes.
I think the parent is referring to the tendency of Asian design to be more ‘fun/cute’ than ‘modern/flat’. There's less infatuation with low contrast flat designs in Asian websites and apps. Ads are somewhat invasive in both.
I kinda like that, actually. It's more usable to me. I'm not a huge fan of current “modern” Western design trends. Asian websites do have a tendency to be a mish-mash of incompatible UI patterns though (IME, but my experience is limited to Weibo and a few misc sites). There's way more consistency in the west.
Yahoo in its heyday wasn't beautiful but it was pretty usable.
Snow focuses on Asian consumers. Like Snapchat, it offers users an array of filters that can add dog ears, glowing eyes and bulbous foreheads to selfies. But Snow also lets users add bottles of soju, the Korean liquor, or images of Korean pop stars. Another filter adds a rain of fried chicken, a favorite South Korean nosh. For Japan there are sumo wrestler and sushi filters.
If you want to win a foreign market, you have to ensure that you meet their needs. This is just Business 101. Any company that thinks that it can simply take a US/Western oriented product, add some language translations, and roll it out in other continents, is going to be massively vulnerable to local competitors that are willing to customize their features to tailor local preferences.
> Notably, it is also gaining traction in China, where the country’s 700 million users make up the world’s largest internet market. There, Snow has a major advantage: Snapchat is blocked in China.
I agree. Chinese protectionism is a whole other story entirely. I was referring specifically to that fact that Snow is beating out Snapchat in South Korea, where Snapchat doesn't face any regulatory barriers.
While I don't know the specific causes. You might be interested to know that South Korea has a very strong history of preferring clones to the original software. Some of it is cultural and linguistic, but Korea also has a very protectivist market. The examples I can think of, Naver over Google, KakaoTalk over Whatsapp/Messaging, KakaoTaxi over Uber, 1km/Hello There over Tinder.
Edit: Actually, Kakao's (the company) business model is to take apps from the West and remake them for the Korean market.
(Talk - Messaging, Music - Music Streaming, Taxi - Taxi Hailing, Story - Facebook)
While I don't have specific examples of this being abused. I would point out that there are actually country/region specific app stores, not one unified store. It's very common for software to not release globally. For example, much to the chagrin of most of my Thai friends, Pokemon Go is still not available in Thailand.
And this will probably be blocked soon also, unless they make an agreement to harmonize their service for a Chinese market and partner with some princeling's tech company.
The rules in China are evolving all the time but basically to have an app in China, you need to have an entity in China, have user data on a server in China, follow all Chinese laws, etc. So if Snow wants to keep it's Chinese user base, they will need to implement everything that other CN messaging apps have done, including censoring specific keywords, etc.
They have an advantage that their own local market is quite large (and growing). It's similar to how a US company can do very well focusing on just us consumers, because the market is so big. Or, same as Japan .
France, Germany are my main areas. It still sends me to wildly different locations each search.
One example near Paris: some tourism company were hijacking Maps results so when I went looking for a specific language school this other place was the first result.
Another example: I was in Cape Verde looking for the ships chandlery. The results returned were in Portugal. My second attempt gave me results in Brazil and Portugal.
I've since learned to sanity check the results first. This can be hard when you are driving in a different country and Maps wants you to board a ferry and drive through sub-Sahara Africa.
Are you searching in the native language for those areas? I think that might be the difference; Google maps search is unpredictable like your examples in English but basically perfect in Japanese.
Don't most markets have their own local apps/sites that are more popular than foreign ones?
I think Kakao is more popular in Korea than Whatsapp. In Russia Yandex is bigger than Google. In China everything is bigger because the foreign apps are banned.
> If you want to win a foreign market, you have to ensure that you meet their needs. This is just Business 101.
Beating the locals at their own game is just Business 101? Seems like an arrogant attitude.
> Beating the locals at their own game is just Business 101? Seems like an arrogant attitude.
When you recast the quote in different words, I suppose. But do you refute that you "have to ensure you've met [your market's] needs"? Is it better to ignore the market's needs instead? That seems more arrogant to me.
Really? That's the opposite of where I thought you were going with your comment. Based on what you're saying, it sounds like all Snapchat has/had to do to be more successful in South Korea was add soju and fried chicken filters to their existing product.
If Caucasian engineers at an American company created fried chicken, sumo wrestler and sushi filters for specific ethnic target markets they'd be accused of ethnic stereotypes and racism.
good luck creating a fried chicken filter targeted at south korea and convincing people it wasn't part of some thinly veiled "fried chickenz and watermelons" plot to insult a large percentage of the american population...
Only Americans would accuse them of racism, because we Americans like to manufacture controversy. Regardless, you either give each market what it wants, or you will fail. If they were really that worried about such accusations, Snapchat could have created an Asian subsidiary company and had that company create and release an Asian version of it. Given that Snapchat is blocked in China, they should have done this anyway and created a version that was palatable to the Chinese government.
Only on HN will you receive genuine advice to create a communication app specifically tailored for the censorship and surveillance purposes of an authoritarian government for profit.
If you dislike Chinese censorship, you can refuse to participate in their market, or you can have a seat at the table and try to work for change from the position of having a popular and valued service in their country. The latter is probably more effective. Snapchat isn't exactly the tool of choice for privacy-minded people anyway.
Probably true; remember the controversy about the skin lightening filter? That would be a default filter in Asia where fair skin is aesthetically considered more beautiful.
I once heard a theory that whiter skins were considered more aesthetically pleasing in old days (in East Asia), because at that time everybody worked at fields, so being pale meant that your family is so rich that you don't have to work. It was something that couldn't be attained by most people.
Fast forward to the industrial age: now poor women worked all day long in a factory, barely getting sunlight, while rich girls would visit beaches and sky resorts, tanning themselves. Suddenly, being slightly tanned is now considered "healthy" and, to some degree, "more beautiful".
That said, most people still seem to like relatively whiter skin, just not 0xffffff.
> I once heard a theory that whiter skins were considered more aesthetically pleasing in old days (in East Asia), because at that time everybody worked at fields, so being pale meant that your family is so rich that you don't have to work. It was something that couldn't be attained by most people.
> Fast forward to the industrial age: now poor women worked all day long in a factory, barely getting sunlight, while rich girls would visit beaches and sky resorts, tanning themselves. Suddenly, being slightly tanned is now considered "healthy" and, to some degree, "more beautiful".
I actually heard this exact theory about skin perceptions in western countries, and I think it's regarded pretty well by sociologists/historians. Being "too pale" is an insult these days among Whites, and many people specifically go to tanning salons or lie in the sun, just to tan/darken their skin tone.
In Texas and other southwest US states, being pale is still a sign of being high class, since so many of the lower class are day laborers working outdoors. This includes classism within the Hispanic races.
Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube are all very popular in SE Asia, especially the ones that are just getting into the internet now (Cambodia, Myanmar, even Vietnam).
Most internet companies in the states have more Asians working there from these countries than in say, South Korea and China, which often have NONE (they are all pretty homogeneous ethnically). To say western internet companies don't have any multi-cultural affinity isn't accurate given the make up of most tech companies.
In this precise case, it has much more to do with :
- It's been launched by Naver, a tech company with deep pockets, not a startup.
- It can access China.
That's interesting. Naver dominates Japan, Taiwan and Thailand with LINE, but they chose to create a new messaging app to go after Korea and China since LINE wasn't getting traction there.
That is so true. You can see a lot of SV startups think if it works in the US, then it works in Asia. AirBnb is a great example something that does not work. When a 5 star hotel cost $50-70 only, people aren't going to pay the same price for someone else's home.
Airbnb certainly works in Asia. Lots of Americans use it to find month-to-month whole apartment rentals. It's safer than paying a wad of cash to some random local landlord.
Americans are using it, but that's a very tiny slice. The local market isn't using it and that's where the bulk of the money is. Using your logic, that would mean Airbnb is working the US, because Chinese people are using it in the US.
Also, you are literally paying the same local landlord plus service fees to Airbnb. It is known that the exact same apartment can be listed +10% more on Airbnb.
Look at all the medium size indie hotels that are popping up all around Asia, and you can see that the local people still prefer hotels.
It's not just that. Asian markets have incredible amount of protectionism and self-promotion that it takes uncanny effort to penetrate as a North American company.
I know China has a lot of protectionism, but I have not heard of it being difficult to get your software/app into other Asian countries. Which ones have a lot of protectionism in terms of software/app stores?
That's tricky. I get the german translation for Snow (Schnee) translating yours too. Is yours a word that would be in the Korean dictionary or is it "just" slang?
You are aware that all data in china has to be available to be available to be randomly searched at any time, and hosted in specific locations that are regulated by the government? Your comment is absurdly naive.
>“With the rise of China and China’s infatuation with Korean culture, it’s breathed new life into Korean start-ups and founders, Mr. Chae said. “This is a market that happens to be a lot bigger than the U.S., that seems to be more welcoming for Korean technology and culture than the Western world ever was.”
This paragraph is telling much than the rest of the article. Working in Japan, I see a similar trend. Except for those already well implanted, companies are not interested in the western world anymore. Not only it's hard, but it's not growing as fast as Asia.
Hiring teams that can understand the target market and culture is also much simpler, and marketing channels are simpler to understand.
I just downloaded snow. While snapchat might have a hard to figure out interface, snow feels down right broken.
After going to the menu to add Facebook friends, a list of people show up with a little "added" icon. There is no confirm button, only back. So I click back and my friend list is still empty.
2/3 the friend finder will not return results and many buttons take upwards of 40 seconds to think about things.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadI never thought about it that way. That's a pretty astute observation.
So the gov wants to maintain control over Chinese interactions with each other, hence any major site in Chinese will get blocked immediate (as soon as Quora allows for Chinese content and it becomes popular, it will be blocked in favor of a harmonized Zhihu).
- They don't do this for economic protectionism (although I know that the Chinese view this as a benefit of the practice).
- and they are unlikely to lift a block on a social network, since social networks and communication channels are what they are primarily afraid of.
Internet companies that don't enable rebellious interactions between Chinese citizens are perfectly accepted...e.g. LinkedIn. Note also that Chinese social media tech, even very successful ones, have had absolutely no significant penetration outside of their protected market...not Myanmar, not Cambodia, none of China's next door neighbors, nor Taiwan or Hong Kong. There are stuck in their own ecosystem, with those that do get to compete with foreign companies, like Alibaba, doing much better outside of China.
Are we using the same ad ridden websites?
Large, popular Korean sites look a lot like Yahoo during its heyday.
Yahoo in its heyday wasn't beautiful but it was pretty usable.
I agree. Also a large number of the websites including government ones requires that you install Active X and have Windows machine with IE.
Many highly trafficked Japanese (and Korean) web sites are model for brevity and efficiency.
Compare:
http://www.sankei.com/
vs
http://www.yahoo.com/
vs
http://www.naver.com/
Sankei site has so much more content, yet its HTML file is only 38kb. Naver site is 97kb. Yahoo's html file is 614kb.
Do View-Source on these sites, and it doesn't take long to figure out what a joke Yahoo site is.
And the real joke is Japanese and Korean web developers make 1/2 or 1/3rd of what Yahoo guys make.
What does that have to do at all with the number of kilobytes for the homepage?
And usually efficiency is rewarded?
Snow focuses on Asian consumers. Like Snapchat, it offers users an array of filters that can add dog ears, glowing eyes and bulbous foreheads to selfies. But Snow also lets users add bottles of soju, the Korean liquor, or images of Korean pop stars. Another filter adds a rain of fried chicken, a favorite South Korean nosh. For Japan there are sumo wrestler and sushi filters.
If you want to win a foreign market, you have to ensure that you meet their needs. This is just Business 101. Any company that thinks that it can simply take a US/Western oriented product, add some language translations, and roll it out in other continents, is going to be massively vulnerable to local competitors that are willing to customize their features to tailor local preferences.
That also helps!
Edit: Actually, Kakao's (the company) business model is to take apps from the West and remake them for the Korean market. (Talk - Messaging, Music - Music Streaming, Taxi - Taxi Hailing, Story - Facebook)
I haven't heard about app level barriers but I wouldn't be surprised
http://searchengineland.com/naver-the-google-of-south-korea-...
It's not because of protectionism.
One example near Paris: some tourism company were hijacking Maps results so when I went looking for a specific language school this other place was the first result.
Another example: I was in Cape Verde looking for the ships chandlery. The results returned were in Portugal. My second attempt gave me results in Brazil and Portugal.
I've since learned to sanity check the results first. This can be hard when you are driving in a different country and Maps wants you to board a ferry and drive through sub-Sahara Africa.
I think Kakao is more popular in Korea than Whatsapp. In Russia Yandex is bigger than Google. In China everything is bigger because the foreign apps are banned.
> If you want to win a foreign market, you have to ensure that you meet their needs. This is just Business 101.
Beating the locals at their own game is just Business 101? Seems like an arrogant attitude.
When you recast the quote in different words, I suppose. But do you refute that you "have to ensure you've met [your market's] needs"? Is it better to ignore the market's needs instead? That seems more arrogant to me.
(Also, never mention "Sea of Japan", or you'll be in deep trouble...)
I thought everyone was doing this.
The first time I heard 一白遮三丑 was an eye-opening experience. I knew the stereotype but not how far it actually went.
Fast forward to the industrial age: now poor women worked all day long in a factory, barely getting sunlight, while rich girls would visit beaches and sky resorts, tanning themselves. Suddenly, being slightly tanned is now considered "healthy" and, to some degree, "more beautiful".
That said, most people still seem to like relatively whiter skin, just not 0xffffff.
> Fast forward to the industrial age: now poor women worked all day long in a factory, barely getting sunlight, while rich girls would visit beaches and sky resorts, tanning themselves. Suddenly, being slightly tanned is now considered "healthy" and, to some degree, "more beautiful".
I actually heard this exact theory about skin perceptions in western countries, and I think it's regarded pretty well by sociologists/historians. Being "too pale" is an insult these days among Whites, and many people specifically go to tanning salons or lie in the sun, just to tan/darken their skin tone.
Most internet companies in the states have more Asians working there from these countries than in say, South Korea and China, which often have NONE (they are all pretty homogeneous ethnically). To say western internet companies don't have any multi-cultural affinity isn't accurate given the make up of most tech companies.
Also, you are literally paying the same local landlord plus service fees to Airbnb. It is known that the exact same apartment can be listed +10% more on Airbnb.
Look at all the medium size indie hotels that are popping up all around Asia, and you can see that the local people still prefer hotels.
I have to say, in the area of emoticon designs, Kakaotalk is still the best.
https://www.airfrov.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Daum...
http://cfile5.uf.tistory.com/image/230DBD3753AD4E8129D4F3
Now imagine your job was to COPY the feature from a SUCCESSFUL app? SO much worse!
This paragraph is telling much than the rest of the article. Working in Japan, I see a similar trend. Except for those already well implanted, companies are not interested in the western world anymore. Not only it's hard, but it's not growing as fast as Asia.
Hiring teams that can understand the target market and culture is also much simpler, and marketing channels are simpler to understand.
That's the definition of "fad", after all.
After going to the menu to add Facebook friends, a list of people show up with a little "added" icon. There is no confirm button, only back. So I click back and my friend list is still empty.
2/3 the friend finder will not return results and many buttons take upwards of 40 seconds to think about things.