When a country has 420 million internet users, there may be no explanation for why some people, products and brands take off and others don't. That's why internet marketing on the mainland has characteristics that are so uniquely Chinese.
Take Yang Xiuyu , for example. 'I was an internet hoo-ha maker [product promoter] between 2002 and 2006,' he said. 'The experience taught me what's interesting to internet users. It was like graduating with a university degree in internet marketing.'
And in 2007 and 2008, Yang made it big with four unusual campaigns. A company hired him to fabricate a Chinese version of Kyle MacDonald, the Canadian who bartered a paper clip all the way to a house in 2005, and followed that with turning a 'guitar girl' and 'the most beautiful cleaning girl' into product spokeswomen, and finally creating a nationwide buyout of Wanglaoji, a herbal beverage.
Today the 36-year-old is marketing director of Erma Interactive Marketing, a Beijing-based company. Such is the success story of one tui shou - literally 'pushing hands', a term taken from tai chi - or internet marketer. Yang and two other marketers coined the phrase in 2005.
Yang describes early internet marketers as 'usually losers in life, either financially or spiritually. After all, who would waste time online if they were successful?'
But how the industry has grown. The public relations market in China exceeded 14 billion yuan (HK$16 billion) in 2008, according to a survey by the China International Public Relations Association (Cipra). Internet PR accounted for only 6.3 per cent of that figure, but that's still 880 million yuan. And even though some people might look at what's being marketed and shake their heads, experts say its peak is still a long way off.