Thanks again for your response to my other comment. This is a great article and it certainly highlights something that has come up repeatedly in my business, which is a lack of a Chinese internet middle class. I think the situation is probably similar to what was happening in the US in the mid 90′s: people were talking about the potential of the internet in business while griping about the lack of profitability. As people spend more money and time online, the idea of web ads became more palatable to a broad swath of advertisers.

An article suggestion for you:

In the West there is a pretty well established path for taking a small site into business, and then getting it funded. In China it seems to me that it is very hard to work out the legal conversion from small to medium to large scale efforts. As a result, the internet is top-heavy with cruddy, well-connected projects. End users suffer. How can small players with high traffic get funding to expand their efforts?

-AR