China blog bubble

Filed in archive Technology on December 28, 2005

Mike Masnick has news from the Chinese hype generator bookee.com:

"Over the summer we wrote about a Bizarre story about a Chinese blogging firm that was getting attention for claiming that it was going to go public with a $1 billion valuation. There was no reality to back up the claim -- just a CEO saying it would be so. There were a lot of other problems with the article, as well (including misleading statements about how much money the company had raised and how much revenue it was making), but it should come as no surprise to find out that the company (which did, indeed, raise the $10 million it was looking for just a few months ago) is now laying off one-quarter of its staff, or about 100 people, claiming that maybe the Chinese blogging business isn't such a big business after all. Of course, the really bizarre part is that this blogging firm could actually already employ 400 people. That seems like an awful lot of people, especially considering that the company wasn't making very much money and (despite the misleading claims) hadn't really raised that much money either."