The outlook for search engine marketing in China appears to be optimistic as the country’s main search provider reports an increase in profits for the final quarter of 2009.
Baidu, the native language and domestically owned Chinese search engine, posted its Q4 2009 earnings earlier this week. According to the figures, the company had a net income of $62.7m, reflecting a 48.2% year on year growth.
The company reported that its overall revenues for Q4 had grown by 39.8% since 2008, to a total of $184.7 million. Almost all of this revenue was driven by PPC advertising and search engine marketing on Baidu.com and its search results pages. Nearly 223,000 advertisers ran campaigns on Baidu in Q4, hoping to reach the world’s largest audience of internet users. Revenue from PPC adverts per customer was reported as $828, up 23.9% from Q4 2008 – but down 3.4% from Q3 2009.
With Google’s ability to serve the Chinese market drawn into question by its recent announcements, Baidu is likely to be the only platform worth discussing for search engine marketing to the Chinese market.
Following a series of intrusive cyber-attacks, Google announced that it would no longer continue to censor topics such as democracy, Tianamen Square and other democracy/human rights information at the behest of the ruling Chinese Communist party.
This has placed the company’s operations in the area in a precarious legal and political situation. Despite announcing that “we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn” in early January though, the company has yet to follow through on its statements.
The company had previously been comparatively unsuccessful in the region in comparison to its growth in other international markets. It had been unable to win over a significant amount of users over from Baidu after years of operating the Google.cn portal. It was commonly believed that its search algorithms were less suited to handling the complexities of sinophone queries.
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