It's an exciting time to be in the online business here in China. With more Chinese using the internet than ever before, many companies are shifting more of their advertising budget from traditional media to the internet. In today's BON feature, Sylvia Gunawan takes a look at China's booming online advertising sector.

Figures from the China Internet Network Information Center this week showed that China's population of Internet users soared nearly 30 percent last year to 384 million. That means there are more regular net users in China than the entire population of the United States.

And given that reach, today, more and more of the survey's that gage public opinion are carried out almost exclusively online. Gathering opinion in this way is cheap, efficient, and above all fast.

The speed with which information travels over the internet means that opinion polls and public reaction can be gathered in a fraction of the time it used to take. And, in a society where, for political and cultural reasons, people tend to be very wary about offering their opinion, internet surveys have another advantage - the safety of anonymity.

But can that cloak of anonymity also lead to distortion of true feelings? To just what extent does online opinion represent real-life opinions gathered in more traditional ways?

In June - a report by The China Internet Network Information Center showed that the number of Internet users in the country had climbed to 420 million - a staggering 36 million more than just six months earlier. This increase also- unsurprisingly- coincides with a surge in online shops and shoppers. BON’s Kelda Yuen has more on China’s online shopping craze and the companies that are cashing in on this booming market.

With so much of life today based around the internet almost a year without online access may seem difficult to imagine. But that's just what happened to residents of Xinjiang in western China.

After the deadly riots there in July of last year the authorities blocked the Internet to virtually the entire population – a ban that lasted in varying degrees until just last week.

Attempts by local governments in China to regulate human flesh searches on the internet, or crowd sourcing as it's also known, has sparked controversy here.

A human flesh search is when thousands, sometimes millions, of inpidual internet users piece together every detail of a person's life and then publish them online. It's part online detective work, part manhunt. And it's proved particularly popular with internet users here who have used the power of the web to expose everyone from corrupt officials to a woman who filmed herself killing a kitten with her stiletto.

As purchasing power in China continues to rise, online shopping has becoming a booming market. Now one company here is taking the next step in the hope of making buying and selling online in China bigger than ever before.

Well, online gaming is one of the biggest growing markets in China. Unlike America, where video games on a console are popular, here it's all about computer games and the online interaction they foster. BON's Tony Zhou tells us about one group of enthusiasts who've made one hugely popular online farm game - into a real-life farm!