Baidu corners market in online advertising
Search engine Baidu seized more than a quarter of the mainland's online advertising market in the first quarter, according to an industry report released yesterday.
Enfodesk, an industrial data base compiled by research firm Analysys International, listed the top three online advertising operators as Baidu, Alibaba and Google China.
They respectively accounted for 27.4 per cent, 18.1 per cent and 7 per cent of the mainland's online ad market share, which means the three together occupied more than half of the total market. Closely following was Sina, with 6.8 per cent of the market share.
Sina, as the leading player in the microblogging market with its Weibo platform, has a lot of potential to increase its market share and catch up with Google China, according to Alex Mou, chief executive of Zuosa, a website providing Weibo-related software and analysis.
Sina maintained that by the end of April, Weibo had already gathered 140 million users and it expected the number to rise to 200 million by the end of this year. Mou said the portal could try innovative ways of advertising with the help of their influential social media business: 'For example, they can recommend a movie on the Weibo page in the hot topic column.'
The report said Google China's advertising market share had slid since it announced it would no longer censor internet search results and automatically redirected its searchers on the mainland to an uncensored portal in Hong Kong last year.
According to previous Analysys reports, Google China's market share was 10.8 per cent in the second quarter last year.
Analysys, which focuses on the technology, media and telecom industries, said business-to-business enterprise Alibaba saw a tremendous rise in its market share in the first quarter, thanks to the improvement in Taobao Express and Taobaoke, two of its e-commerce services.
The report also revealed new media represented by Youku, a video-sharing website, and Soufun, a mainland property website, had maintained a favourable momentum of growth. Soufun's market share of 2.5 per cent had over-run Netease, a major internet portal in the country.
