Although China's Internet-based economy was affected by the global financial woes in the third quarter of this year, it is faced with more opportunities than challenges upon the massive netizen population, sources from market consulting firm iResearch said Saturday.

The market size of Internet-based economy was 14.63 billion yuan (2.15 billion U.S. dollars) between July and September, a growth of 52.2 percent on the same period of last year, or 9.8 percent on the second quarter of this year.

However, in the second quarter the year-on-year growth rate was 62.8 percent and the quarter-on-quarter pace was 14.9 percent, the sources said.

Advertising and games continued to be major sources for Internet business revenue, combining to account for 72.7 percent of the total income of the web-based economy. Market share of web games was 37.4 percent, while that of advertising was 35.3 percent.

The market volume of Internet ads amounted to 5.16 billion yuan in the third quarter, up 12.9 percent. The growth was attributable mainly to the Beijing Olympics.

As demand from abroad was driven down by the financial turmoil, the B2B e-commerce market grew only 0.7 percent to 1.46 billion yuan. Meanwhile, growth in Internet-based job-hunting business slowed to 4 percent, due largely to difficulties in corporate operations and ensuing less employment.

The tourism reservation market increased by only 1.3 percent to 712 million yuan, as a result of shrinking logistics and travels around the Beijing Olympics upon tightened security control.

(Xinhua News Agency November 15, 2008)