One of the most discussed topic on Vietnamese blogo-lune in the

One of the most discussed topic on Vietnamese blogo-lune in the recent days is the question “Who is the leader of Vietnamese online services?”. Sparked by Ducban, it is now discussed on several popular tech blogs such as Fresco2.0 and Huyenchip

I’d like join the discussion with my take on the topic. As all posts on this topic are in English, this one will be too.

To answer the question “Who is the leader of Vietnamese online services?”, you must define 2 things:

- What is an online service? It is just any service over the Internet (including online games, P2P, banking…)? Or is it only among web-based services? If it was about web-based services only, we still have several types of websites: e-commerce, C2C, platform, tools and content…

- What are the criteria to define the “leader”? Don’t rank them using your impression or personal experience. I prefer quantifiable measures, and the easiest among them are revenue, traffic or user-base.

In a broad context, Vinagame, with its huge user-base, traffic and revenue from various online services mainly online gaming and web-based content is definitely the leader of online service provider in Vietnam.

Now, in a tech-guru-with-social-media-orientation (like most bloggers are) point of view, I assume that an “online service” is a web-based service which provides user with a platform or utilities to access (search engine, news aggregation, music/video/photo sharing and streaming, location services…) and/or to communicate, to do business (social network, forum, email, chatting, online store…) , exclusive of content provider (most newspaper). The criteria then must be either traffic or revenue because size of user-base does not applicable for access services with little user-lockin like search, news aggregation or reference.

In term of revenue, I doubt that any of Vietnamese online service provider has a substantially stable and larger revenue stream than the others, as most of them share a common revenue model: online advertising (if they can even sell ads at all). However, the point is none of the online service company in Vietnam is public company (some’s parents are listed company such as Vincom and FPT, but the company themselves are private). That is to say, theoretically, their revenue are not for the world to see, and does not affect public perception of the company (the view on which we are discussing).

The only criterion remains is traffic, which can be compared using third-party tools such as Quantcast, Google Trends or Alexa. Still, Zing.vn by Vinagame is still the website with most traffic (come mainly from its MP3 sharing and Movies streaming services). However, ones can hardly call Zing.vn the leader of any service (except for email), because Vinagame crammed all of its user-base and traffic onto this single domain.

So, in the end, if we have to pick a single leader, it is Zing.vn, but it makes more sense if we categorize the services, and then pick the leader of each category rather than trying to find the overall leader. Anhhung has compiled a list, and it is quite good, but the ranking need to be considered.

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