I spent today at the Piper Jaffray and ChinaVenture Investment Conference in Shanghai. All the usual suspects were there: Shanda's CEO Tang Jun gave a good keynote; Sina.com's CFO spoke about how not much could touch a company like Sina.com since it was such a powerful media play; and Ctrip.com's CFO Jane Sun talked about the widening gap between her company and eLong in the Chinese Internet travel sector.

My biggest impression of the day was that good Chinese Internet statistics are so hard to come by: Sina's Yu spoke about the Internet taking 2-3% of the total advertising pie in China; Li Ya from Phoenix New Media quoted 5%; and other speakers and panelists during the day quoted 4%. It might be splitting hairs, but when talking about billions of dollars, a few percentage points — no matter how small — are important.

David Zhu, CEO of Focus Media's subsidiary Allyes, gave the biggest punch when he said Internet media publishers were "stupid" to sell advertising on a time basis rather than by impressions. For those of you outside China, you might not be aware that a very large percentage of advertising on Chinese portals and other websites is not sold by impression (though it still might be priced such) but rather for a specific time period. Why? Because advertisers are unsophisticated: if you put their ad in a rotation and they view the page once and don't see it, they get angry. So rather than selling ads on a pay-per-view model like they do in Europe and North America, most advertising in China appears to be sold by time period (I know that's what we do too 99% of the time). It is the rare client who wants ads sold on an impression basis, but that particular ad zone is taken by a client who paid for a solid day/week/month, so they either need to wait or be placed somewhere else on the page… which is one reason portals like Sina.com and Sohu.com are so full of flashing advertising.

One other note on China investments. I just received an email from Chris Cary, editor at Sharesleuth.com, who has posted a new article on a China-based company listed overseas. Sharesleuth is bankrolled by billionaire Dallas Mavericks basketball team owner Mark Cuban and the site focuses on very detailed research on listed companies in the attempt to find cheats. It's worth a read.