51.com, China's largest blogging community, has reached 60 million users, and is still growing at a rate of nearly 5 million new subscribers per month. They've also raised another $10 million in their second round of funding.
51.com is a personal blog network, ranking in the top 20 Chinese websites worldwide. With an investment from Sequoia Capital China and SIG amounting to $6 million, and another $10 million this year from Intel Capital, Sequoia Capital, Redpoint and SIG in a second round of funding, 51.com has been able to grow at their significant rate. This should make their investors, all backers of web successes such as MySpace, very happy.
With their success, 51.com is looking to better monetize their highly-valued users, which spend an average of 40 minutes on the site per visit. Promoting themselves as a better avenue for online marketing than a portal such as MySpace may be their next largest strategy implementation. Finding a way to better target ads within their large blogging community will set them apart from those sites that require a broad approach to mass marketing, and bring in a higher advertising rate per user.
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