Goyoo: Building a business on the popularity of internet cafes in China

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CEO Jerry Wang

In China, you can find lots of internet cafes in just about any city. Even after broadband or mobile devices have been widely adopted, internet cafes still attract many people. One of the reasons behind this popularity is that students can enjoy games a little more freely without parents around to nag them. Well over 100,000 internet cafes exist in the country, and out of those, around 30,000 are i8 cafes, using a system developed by Goyoo. That means, there’s an i8 for every 10,000 people in China. Just as a comparison, Korea is famous for having many internet cafes, and there’s an internet cafe for every 2500 people.

According to the CEO, Jerry Wang, Goyoo’s system consists of launcher software on the PCs, games, and routers and servers to to support their distribution system. The company operates an advertising network, AdPro, which serves advertisements to the monitors of the PCs in these cafes. That’s the main source of revenue for the company. The maximum impressions achieved in a single day is 150 million, and that came just after four months after the launch of AdPro.

The difference between AdPro and the other existing ad networks is that it can pick up very detailed user attributes. It can identify which site each user views because of the identification card required by law in China for people to internet cafes. So advertisers can control the advertisements they serve to each user. It is also possible to track users’ movement across different websites.

Goyoo is also the world-biggest partner DSP (demand-side platform) for Baidu, covering about 25 million users.

The company plans to launch a new service, LeWifi, which will be distributed to other internet cafes (besides i8) and fast-food restaurants for free. The router of LeWifi can be controlled completely in the cloud, just like Cisco’s Meraki. The company plans to share revenue with outlets based on the amount of traffic to the router. They expect to reach $30 million in annual sales and 100 million daily users in 2014. LeWifi routers will be set up in as many as 200,000 outlets all over in China.

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