The 7th installment of a mini-salon on the state of the Internet in China, reflecting the viewpoints of three of China’s best-known Internet pundits, transcribed on Mai Tian’s blog recently. Click to read parts 1, 2, 3/4, 5, and 6.

7. “The mainstream users of the Chinese Internet”

Mai Tian: I agree with this [Keso's assertion that success for a Web company is impossible without breaking into the three major urban markets of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou], but there are still some differences between what Keso and I think. Where in the heck are the the maintream China’s Netizens? If we say that 70% of Netizens are low-end mainly entertainment users, then I think that these are the mainstream users of the Chinese Internet.

Xie Wen: You have to look at this from two sides. In 1999 when I was working on Ourgame.com our traffic reached the top spot very quickly. Simultaneous users reached 10,000 quickly, and at the time Tencent was actually smaller than we were. Were we mainstream? We simply had more features than the others. Everyone loved it because there just wasn’t any alternative. This is a sort of self-affirmation. Real society isn’t like that. With nothing else to do they just start playing. Everyone had to go through life, but without services on the Web that could satisfy them. The demand was generated off-line. The process of transition from off-line to online isn’t complete, and you can’t generalize about Netizens that way.

Keso: Actually I think that the force of inertial thinking and indolent thinking are behind everyone all following one another in doing this, and it’s not necessarily that there were lots of opportunities in this field. There weren’t actually all that many opportunities in entertainment, but no one was doing the other fields due to risks. I once saw IDG talking about their investment principles: If you’re targeting white collars, we award you points for that.

Xie Wen: Because there was a low level of competition, a dearth. CTrip and Home Inns are both [targeting white collars].

Keso: Including the investment in Chamate. When white collars think of a restaurant it’s easy: it’s cheap, the taste is consistent, and wherever I go and see a Chamate, I know that if I go in and eat, it won’t be bad. Redbaby.com is the same way. Many investors are willing to do white collar-facing deals. [Alibaba/Yahoo China chief] Jack Ma is proof that there’s value in doing things other than entertainment. He refused to do entertainment, and he succeeded.

Xie Wen: When mobile phones were hot people were in mobile phones, when automotive was hot they were in automotive. Today I see that Ninbo Bird [a Zhejiang-based handset maker] isn’t doing handsets any more: they’re making cars. (Laughs) You call that mainstream, but the real mainstream isn’t necessarily going to help guide you to a choice. First, it’s where your abilities and your thinking are; second, it’s whether the undeveloped markets and your abilities are in alignment. In 2000 doing games, 10s of millions were invested, but now its a few hundred million. If you don’t have financial resources there’s no way to enter this market.

Mai Tian: What Keso says also makes sense. But the current situation with Chinese Netizens is that the ones whose attention is really sticky are people under 25–kids with nothing to do. There aren’t many people over 25–these account for 30% of netizens–who are constantly online. But speaking strictly of SNS, I believe that the age of Netizens will fall at an even faster than for the average.

Xie Wen: Assuming that your premisis proves true, it’s too late to do anything about it. Because 51.com and Tencent already have the younger Internet users already locked up. Given this, your relevant opportunities are even fewer, because everyone thinks so. So you have to find a opportunities that are bigger than they appear to be. You have to find opportunities where you’re the only one in the field.

Keso: Google’s success was in their allowing users to enter quickly and leave. They satisfied the demands of users. If from the get-go they wanted to keep users on their site, that would have been the wrong way to break open the market. Competing for time users spend on line is a difficult thing. There’s only so long people can spend online: if they’re spending more time with you, that means they’re spending less with me. There’s not much hope.

Xie Wen: There’s one hypothesis that say that unless you give users a total different experience, but this revolution is an even bigger one.

Stay tuned for Part 8.