I have spent countless hours working with online tools to help identify and value the top keywords in other languages including Chinese. Everytime I am going through the Chinese search and translator tools for my other job, I notice the immense popularity of Basketball in China. Below are some screenshots of how popular the search term “NBA” is. [Click on the thumbnails to get a full view]
The first screenshot shows that the NBA is the top consistently searched term on Baidu which is one of the most popular search engines in China. You can see that it is searched over 300,000 times a day. The next screenshot show the translated version of the first list (via google translate). You can see that the top ten searches consist of: 
- NBA
- Movie / Film
- qq (most popular messenger service in China)
- Sichuan Earthquake
- Earthquake
- Potato Network (Tudou – Video sharing site similar to”YouTube”)
- Fiction / Novel
- 126 (Netease email service I believe)
- You Wonder (Youku – video sharing site similar to “YouTube” also)
- Wenchuan Earthquake
The earthquake searches are up there for obvious reasons. Please note, If you would like to give to the disaster relief in China I recommend going through this link via Amazon.
The rest of the searches give you an idea of how popular the term NBA really is as it consistently is searched higher than some of China’s most popular sites. The last screenshot shows you a graph by Google Trends of the term “NBA” over the last few years in China. You can see the growth through Google as well.
With popularity of Yao Ming, emergence of Yi Jianlian and the formation of NBA China, there are some really big things taking place to cater to the Chinese Basketball fans. I imagine we will only continue to see more efforts to tap into this huge market.
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