An ever-changing site…
Rather surprisingly, Vogue's Chinese website undergoes major changes on a regular basis, which result in widely different page content and, consequently, significant differences in the volume of data that the visitor has to download to her computer from the site's server in order to view the page. Because of this, the probability of the page displaying in full -- without a wait as long as several minutes, depending on the bandwidth offered by the internet subscription -- is very variable. The user will not wait several minutes to watch the web page appear, and will certainly give up after a few dozen seconds. This results in a failure to display information for the publisher as well as for the advertisers.
For the month of July, the failure rate measured daily ranged from 0 to over 40 percent.
… accessible or not…
40 percent -- this means four in 10 visitors could not access the site. Practically one out of two people would not have been able to see any advertisements displayed on the site. These undisplayed advertisements were not counted by statistical tools, and therefore probably were not billed as they could have been.
The results obtained nevertheless require additional analysis. China is a big country with an unequal population distribution. Fashion magazine editors may wish to target a potential readership which is definitely more vast in some of the richest cities, like Shanghai or Beijing, while the populations of the towns in the middle of the country are a lesser target.
… depending on the place of connection
The following graph shows the rate of successful display of the home page of Vogue's Chinese website for the month of July 2009, for each of the cities from which the study was conducted.
To best analyze these results, it should be noted that during the internet's beginnings in China, the authorities decided to structure the network in two parts: the north, management of which was assigned to China Netcom, and the south, run by China Telecom. Interconnection between these two networks is very poor. This means internet users connecting in the north encounter degraded performance on sites hosted in the south, and vice-versa.
Hosted in the north of China, Vogue's Chinese internet site, therefore, predictably offers its best performance to the cities served by China Netcom.
To compensate for the impact of China's "digital divide", a Content Delivery Network (CDN) was set up. The CDN is a web content local distribution technique which allows internet users to download site data locally, without having to fetch it from the source which may be geographically remote.
Notwithstanding the implementation of this service by CondéNet China (interactive subsidiary of CondéNast), cities in the south or west of China experience inferior availability.
In conclusion…
While the recession is in full swing, even the most prestigious companies are compelled to make drastic budget restrictions. These cutbacks have frozen communications budgets from the start, clamping down most particularly on advertising expenditure.
This effect is attenuated in China, where the luxury market is showing strong growth. Furthermore, as elsewhere, the trend is to shift communications investments from print to electronic media.
A sizeable audience therefore generates income vital to publishers' business. Good overall quality of their online magazines' websites will enable them to pull ahead of the competition while inciting the internet user to buy the print version, and will also make it possible to generate additional revenue.
Advertisers are generally present across the range of websites of a given segment of the press. Whatever site the user visits, she will see the advertisement that the advertiser wishes to show the public. Whether a particular site is accessible or not matters little to the advertiser, who generally pays only for the advertisements that are viewed. It is the publisher, then, who is directly penalized for less-than-perfect service.
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Christophe Depeux is general manager, IP-Label Technology, Asia Pacific
