We say ‘google it’ but China says ‘baidu it’. iResearch released its annual report on China’s online search market and Baidu emerged as the top earner.
Baidu owned 71.6 percent of the total online search engines revenue at $1.2 billion. While Google, at second placing, owned 26 percent at $433 million. The rest are shared among Sogou, Soso and other minor search engines.
Online search is a popular channel for advertisers as the total online search advertising market is consistently on the rise. Last year, China recorded US $1.66 billion worth of online search ads sales. This figure was expected to rise to $2.55 billion by the end of this year. We can expect Baidu’s revenue to rise as it continues to snatch market share from Google and other minor search engines.
China has over 420 million users and is the largest Internet market in the world. Baidu is at a strong position ever since Google stopped its operation in China. But in terms of international ad sales, Baidu still has a lot of work to do. Baidu is effective in helping advertisers to market within China. However, Google would be a better choice if advertisers were targeting international markets.
It isn’t an easy task to gain global dominance. Baidu understands it has to gain more users across different parts of the world to do so. Most webpages are written in English. Crawling and indexing them is an expensive task. It is an uphill battle fighting against Google and Bing. Nonetheless, Baidu is playing its part to help bridge the west and the east. It has recently launched an English blog which authors about Chinese Internet culture to help English readers understand China better.
via Digitaleastasia
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