Tigergate - South China Tiger Photos Creates Web Controversy

As the internet expands in China, the fortunes of some of the industry's most important players - the portals - depend on often obscure online obsessions and the sites are not leaving things to chance. Controversy over an alleged photo of a rare tiger whipped up an internet frenzy. Take the scandal known in China as Tigergate. In northern autumn, a farmer in China's Shaanxi province spied a wild South China tiger, believed to be extinct, and snapped a picture of it - or so he said.

The photo spread like wildfire on the Chinese internet, drawing self-styled citizen reporters, panels of academic experts and even government officials into a debate about whether it was real.

China's web portals thrive on debates over matters such as Tigergate.

One government official's tiger blog alone was visited more than a million times. Some people who suspected the photo was fake became "tiger fighters", which "tiger protectors" insisted the image and the tiger were authentic.

Presiding over it all were the web portals, which thrive on the constant and careful fanning of debate.

Tigergate is one of several Chinese internet fads that have attracted attention recently. Sexually explicit photos featuring a Chinese rap star causing a major uproar.

Another scandal emerged over a doctored picture of antelope blissfully coexisting with a controversial new railway line to Tibet.

It has become a predictable pattern: China's portals amplify and orchestrate the incidents for public consumption, driving traffic to their sites.

"After Netizens started the discussion, web portals such as Netease followed up and played the key role," said internet critic Hong Bo.

"This is the Chinese-style internet community."

Business for China's big portals is small but growing fast. Their total revenue hit 12.35 billion yuan ($1.85 billion) last year, up from CNY10 billion in 2006.

About one-third of the portals' total 2007 revenue came from online advertising. The top four Chinese portals - Sina, Sohu.com and Netease.com, all listed on Nasdaq stock market, and Hong Kong-listed Tencent Holdings - together accounted for just more than 75 per cent of that revenue.

Total revenue is expected to reach CNY16.19 billion this year and CNY21.33 billion next year, according to the Data Centre of the China Internet, a researcher and consultancy.

In October, Sina.com ran a blog by a government official to defend the farmer, Zhou Zhenglong, and the local government, which had been accused of fuelling the tiger rumour to spur tourist visits. Cameraunion.com, a professional photography portal, in November posted an older, commercial photo of a tiger that looked a lot like the farmer's, casting doubt on his claim.

Shortly after that, Netease scored an eyeball-grabbing coup by posting 40 digital photos of the tiger, purportedly taken by the farmer.

US portals like to kick up a storm, too, and Yahoo's message boards, for example, can be lively, although they are not key drivers of traffic the way message boards are for China's portals.

US portals enjoy a more reliable feed of news and entertainment content to draw advertisers. In China, portals depend on a more diverse revenue stream, peddling everything from messaging systems such as Tencent's popular QQ to online games that draw huge numbers of users.

Shortly after it posted its 40 photos of the tiger, Netease convened a panel of experts to evaluate them, including the China Photographer Association, the Huxia Evidence Identification Centre, a zoologist, a detective, professors from Zhongshan University and the Forensic Science Association.

Sina, Sohu.com and Netease all dispatched their own reporting staffs to cover the latest tiger news.

All three started special bulletin pages about Tigergate to drive traffic. Online community sites such as Tianya, Cameraunion and Baidu Post Bar ran discussion forums.

The discussion site Xici.net took a Chinese expression about viewing a fight from a safe distance, "to sit on the mountain and watch the tigers fight" and named its tiger-discussion room "South China Tiger sits on the mountain and watches the people fight".

The Wall Street Journal

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