I actually own a couple of busy proxy sites (nukeproxy.com and hugeproxy.com) and see a lot of traffic from the asia area. Proxy sites help residents of that geographical area get around blocked ip subnets. On a different note, I own a free hosting site (hostingeveryone.com) which has over 30,000 free users and about half of them are from the asian geographical area. Seems they are very big into free hosting.
Well, if you count porn sites then blocking them probably is the natural thing especially in the Asian society where sex is still somewhat taboo. But for other contents, I guess the one thing to do is that if you consider China as a valuable audience then a mirror site in the PRC may not be a bad idea. There are people who do offer China hosting. The thing is that hosting proxy is somewhat in the gray area. Some web hosts do not allow that because of the risks and resources it uses.
How is the CTR of Ads? AFAIK asian are more conscious about Ads..at least those i know (i did some test on my friend and coworker). They are good spotting Ads
The way I look at it, if you are surfing using a proxy, the chances of clicking on adsense banners are slim. The last time I ran URL Shortening service which place the site in question in a frame basically only shows Public Announcement Ads. I am from asia and my friends don't click on banners.
I actually stopped using google or ypn (felt like I had no control and was getting screwed by them) and started using my own built from scratch advetising that looks just like adsense and ypn to sell out ads and support my own sites. I have the code for this advertising on about 30 sites right now and it appears that the hugeproxy.com site gets about 303:1 (or 0.3%) click through rate for ads shown. I do not have a way to track the country that clicked on the ads, so I can not be sure 100% that the clicks came from an asian region. NukeProxy.com has a 200:1 (or 0.5%) click through rate. I actually think both of those are pretty impressive given that they both get about 2000 - 5000 unique visitors a day meaning that I can expect about 10 - 25 clicks on advertising at nukeproxy.com a day and about 12 - 15 clicks on advertising on HugeProxy.com per day.
have you guys looked at many chinese websites? they are completely covered in ads, and especially flashing and bouncing ones. It gives me a headache when i watch my gf browsing the net. Agreed, it is generally best to host in the target country. Having a dedicated server for your site will save you the trouble of that though. Most sites will get through the chinese content filter.
I agree fully, and experience the same kind of headaches when watching my HK gf surf forums and asian sites. What I cannot figure out is wether these cutesy, bright pink flashing ads actually work on chinese surfers or if it is that kind of thing that makes them more 'ad blind', or perhaps only ad blind to regular ads which try to be simple and professional looking. From what I have seen many asian surfers prefer this 'unprofessional' looking style, so ratherthen neat subtle adverts they prewfer loud in-your-face 'disney' type of ads. Would be very interesting to do some testing on this with a site that already attracts a large number of asian viewers.
i figure out they don't care design much and there is not much site using the web 2.0 design... most of the popular site look exactly like craigslist and i have no idea why... this is one of the most popular site in HK - uwants.com also i guess asian, especially Chinese webmaster doesn't understand less is more..they think more Ads = higher chance of getting click...
http://www.goodwaiter.com/ I got a crapload of hits from that proxy, but I don't know if its Chinese :s its Asian though
i expect its because china hasnt done much graphic design before the last 20 years, so theres nobody to teach the students how to make proper designs. Besides, if all you saw was these busy sites perhaps you'd build the same thing. It seems like most of the people around china are adept at copying but not creating new things nowadays, its because of the education system.