Vietnam Bloggers & Social Media Landscape at a Glance
It was Yahoo!360, blame it.
While the world was eyeing on bloggers.com and wordpress.com, on this side of the globe, Yahoo!360 ruled. It was not a tool specifically designed for the Vietnam market, but the market took it anyway, with great passion and enthusiasm. Born on 29th March 2005, Yahoo!360, although still in its Beta form, rocked Vietnam social media scene. Many debates argued that its success due to the early and dominant arrival of Yahoo Mail and Messengers where most of the community has already established their contact and networks. So moving to the blog side was just a click away.
Yahoo!360 Blog, allows users to customize their screen, add friends, socialize online and offline, gather network and has genuinely created an online playground for Vietnamese Internet savvy users. Although Yahoo! global warned to close the service a few times and the Yahoo!Vietnam has seen a mix of trying to maintain the operation and investment versus tempting to close it down.
Nevertheless, emerged from Yahoo!360 is a list of hot bloggers (many of them are journalists), whom PR departments in various agencies incorporated into clients’ marketing comms and PR activities. Other examples of influential Vietnam bloggers include:
1. Ha Kin: Writer

- Link: http://yobanbe.zing.vn/yobanbe/blog/sharebloguser.242df56743ad791be5fe57db9dbb7c15.html
- Pageviews: 1,658,925
- Profile: Writer. Author of “New York Love Story”. Ha Kin at first posted the story partly on her blog, after receiving good feedback and was welcomed by readers, her book was published. Besides, Ha Kin is a photo-lover.
- Blog content: daily life and emotion, sharing her photos.
- Readership profile: 18-28. HN/HCMC
2. Gia Bach: editor of teen magazine HHT2!

- Pageviews: 3,450,000. Ranked 2 among 67,000 blogs of Viet blog community (Source: Xemblog.com)
- Profile: He is the Chief Editor of HHT2!. His network is wide range from the North to the South. Emotionally, optimistic, sensitive, always full of love with his family and work, his blog has been one of the most famous one.
- Blog content: dairy of his son and family, tips/experience sharing about living in life
- Readership profile: 18-30. HN/HCMC
3. Expat Joe

- Pageviews: 2.000.000
- Profile: 29. Foreigner living in Hanoi since 2006, he can speak and write Vietnamese very well. Knowledgeable, humorous and intelligent, his way of writing made him become a hot blogger, then published his self-story. He is now working as an editor and MC for VTV6.
- Blog content: sharing thoughts and knowledge, open discussion topics.
- Readership profile: 18-28. HN/HCMC
The majority of hot bloggers are journalists, photographers. Unfortunately there are no specialized areas of interest. Most of local bloggers interested in entertainment, gossips, personal life stories and some occasional travel pieces.
The Viet bloggers community is popular among teenagers up to young professionals, and some occasional oldies, though maximum would be 40 years of age bloggers. Majority of bloggers and Internet users concentrates in the 2 main cities of Vietnam: Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh City.
A young popular whereby 50% is around 20-30 years old, the social media network and its offerings is attracting more and more users. Estimated of those are active on the net, 22% has used or upload applications, 55% engaged in photo sharing, 22% for video, 31% begins a new blog. Very promising future.
Recent rumours regarding the shut down of Yahoo!360 made some current ‘citizens’ to migrate to Yume (http://www.yume.timnhanh.com/), now claimed the most popular social site for Vietnam, allowing Yahoo!360 users to sync all their content into the new format. Some suspicions over Yume buy-out hot bloggers from Yahoo!360 to have their content also on their site while most of Yahoo!360 bloggers still holding on tight their blog page, hesitate to transfer.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Digital Influence, Influencers, Research & Insights, Vietnam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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May 5th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Nice post Ann….
May 7th, 2009 at 12:03 am
I enjoyed reading your post. Very informative and well written. However, I’d like to point out that there is a great number of HOT bloggers on Yahoo!360 blog who chose to write exculsively about political issues. And the number of their pageviews is huge, perhaps, one of the highest in Vietnam (try to check out Vang Anh, Tac Ke, Cavenui, Nguoi Buon Gio… blogs). It’s the result of the press freedom and rights Vietnam. And it’s also one of the main reasons why Yahoo!360 Blog is such a winning case here. Yahoo!360 Blog is not only a personal “online diary”, it also becomes one of the most “sensitive and daring” sources to look for or discuss political facts, issues and opinons in Vietnam. Cheers!
June 9th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Yahoo 360 is by far the most dominant blogging platform for Vietnamese bloggers within Vietnam. The service closes in July 2009 and it looks like it’ll make a pretty big, if short term dent, in blogs over there,
http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/271198,as-yahoo-shuts-down-service-vietnam-bloggers-seek-new-homes.html
To avoid losing Vietnamese clients, Yahoo is offering a Vietnam-only successor called Yahoo 360 Degrees Plus. Tri said efforts had been made to allow users to easily migrate their earlier content and friend lists to the new site.
Several users said making the switch was still difficult. “I spent about three months moving data,” said novelist and literary blogger Nguyen Quang Lap.