China Lifestyle Section
Do you know what it’s like to live in China? Do you!? Can you even comprehend living your daily existence in a country so far from your previous home that it took an aliteratively named Italian man a decade, fuelled by the promise of pasta, to find it? Well, it’s no different. It’s definitely strange, there are points that border on batshit crazy, but all in all it’s still life. But what are those differences? What does living there actually look like?
A website that hosts and presents beautifully the glamorous (or less so) pictures you take of your Chinese domicile. That aunt that’s been bugging you to show her where you live, not just with a blurry few seconds of Skype call background or the bits and pieces she can glean from market haul photos. Honest to goodness real estate level photos. Can you manage that? Well, you’ve got a smartphone with a banging camera, or if you don’t you can literally pick one up off the street (it is China). You’ve got skills honed from Instagram and pretty flower macros, tranquil village landscapes or if you’re like me, gritty photojournalism shots of polluted rivers. You can make your apartment look a little less the depressing Batcave it probably is.
So you upload your photos, write a description of the building, area, neighbours, amenities, and price. Keep it private or associate your twitter handle. Why do you do this? Puts you in the running for weekly awards and prizes. Out of a few categories maybe your personal shrine to gaming takes the title for “Best man cave in China” and a sponsoring Taobao e-store sends you a game in the mail, gratis. Also, you can get that annoying Aunt off your back. Maybe you’re in the running for “OCD clean-freak-of-the-week”, well if you seize the title all your neurosis gets validated and you get a little shot of dopamine don’t you? Also, maybe a box of home goods shows up at your door, thanks to a kind but as of yet unnamed sponsor.
So there’s sponsors, there’s incentivized users, but what’s the business model for the site runner? It’s the dead horse of the Western web, that ol’ pony we’ve ridden hard and put away wet. Why it’s advertising. The Chinese web is plastered with ads. But they’re all in Chinese. Chinese companies, at least some of them, there’s enough that it’s a statistical certainty, would love to advertise to the captive market of middle-class ESL teachers in the country. A population numbering in the tens of thousands nationally, we are desperate for products and services available to us in English. For homewares (TV’s, consoles, kitchen gadgets, specialty foods, towels bigger than our forearms) it’s a no-brainer. I can think of Xiaomei as an early-stage, high-profile sponsor. So there’s the idea. You’ve got a point man already in-country who’s desperate to do. This idea is for sale, anybody biting?
@yankeekiwi
