Hurrah- Actics is exploding in China! According to Google Analytics, we’re attracting tens of thousands of visitors a month from all corners of the People’s Republic and are rapidly moving towards six-digit figures. Great news, isn’t it?

Well, not exactly. As our in-house Sherlock Holmes Henrik realized, something didn’t make sense. How could it be that Actics had so much Chinese traffic but not a single Chinese user? When you have tens of thousands of visitors you would expect at least one of them to sign up, wouldn’t you? It seemed like an insoluble mystery, but Henrik put on his deerstalker, had a quick last puff of opium, and then went out and discovered the answer: 

Actics has been copied! A Chinese site by the name of exnb has stolen our design- and as a result their traffic is now popping up in our Google Analytics reports.

Maybe we should be upset about such blatant theft. But then again: we’re not exactly alone. As I discovered in an article in the Economist, LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube all have hordes of Chinese copycats. And on a funnier note, even Harry Potter hasn’t been spared. If you want to find out more about such contemporary classics as:

  • ‘Harry Potter and the Waterproof Pearl’
  • ‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince’
  • And the best one of all: ‘Harry Potter and the Chinese Overseas Students at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’

then check out this hilarious piece in the NY Times.