Have China news portals a perspective

the old China Online logo

The China Law Blog pointed at yet another English China-news portal: China Online:

The site boasts of having "well over 6,000 China related articles and over 40,000 content pages and 600,000 unique visitors a month." Of those readers, 19% come from the United States, 18% come from China, 12% from Germany, 11% from France, and 8% from Great Britain.

That was the second new China portal in one week, after I talked last week with the people of Jongonews. I always boast that I can find anything online, but guess I just have not been looking in the right direction.
According to Alexa, one online traffic authority, China Online ranks 28,577 and that is pretty good compared to Jongnews (1,192,476) and they beat even this weblog (354,913). The number of other sites linking to China Online is pretty low (53), Jongonews has none and this weblog 216. Since linking is the way to get noticed on the internet, their lack of links might explain they are not part of the online chatter.

Is the model financial viable? The first wave of China news portals in the second half of the 1990s has learned the hard way you cannot make money with China news in English. The old China Online was then the leader of the pack, although its amazing success of getting round after round of VC-money was not matched by its revenue.
My own Chinabiz is one of the few that survived the first bubble, mainly because we were too late for the big money. We moved from news to opinion and stalled our ambition of getting filthy rich in the process. Witch 25,000 subscribers it is now is a nice marketing tool that brings in secondary business that is profitable.
The Chinese portals have become profitable on advertisements over the past few years, after things looked grim for a while after their main source of revenue, SMS-messages, was all but killed by China Mobile. Of course, there is more ad money for online ventures. But it looks very unsure whether that would also work out for the English-language portals that deal in news.
News has become a free commodity and unlike the end in the 1990s in China dealing with the information overflow and making sense out of that has become more important than getting the actual information.
From that perspective, the mission of China portals behind a financial firewalls, like Inside China Today or The China Perspective (never heard of before) seems even more crazy, but they still exist. My take is that they cater for the large amount of more conservative news-seekers, who are still at lost when they have to Google. When they have an audience now, that could work out fine a bit longer. But I would not start it as a new business.

Update: one of my online contacts at Twitter suggests that China Online is stealing the content from other sources. Addition: Have a look at the comments. The suggestions is wrong.