Baidu Further Ahead in China Search Market Share in Q4 2010

Without a legitimate contender to its throne, it isn’t surprising that Baidu is taking a tighter grip of its dominance in the Chinese search market landscape during the fourth quarter of 2010 — up from 73% to 75.5%.

From Associated Press:

Search engine Baidu further strengthened its dominance of the Chinese Internet market in the fourth quarter at the expense of US rival Google, a research firm said Wednesday.

Baidu’s share of the increasingly lucrative sector hit 75.5 percent in the last three months of the year, compared with 73 percent in the third quarter, Beijing-based Analysys International said in a statement.

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Baidu Starting to Reap Gains of Google’s China Exit

It did not take long for Baidu to show everyone it benefited from Google’s widely publicized departure from China operations earlier this year. The Chinese search engine giant announced its unaudited first quarter earnings that indicated an increase of more than half of its earnings in the past year.

First quarter revenues hit 1.294 RMB, 59.6 percent higher than the same period of 2009. Even more impressive were operating profits that jumped 530.8 million RMB (+167.4%) and net income was 480.5 RMB (+165.3%)

Traffic acquisition costs as a component of cost of revenues were CNY171.3 million, representing 13.2% of total revenues, as compared to 15.3% in the corresponding period in 2009 and 16.0% in the fourth quarter of 2009.

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195M Young Chinese Netizens Spend Time Online On Music, Games, Video

According to the annual China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) report “2009 Report on the Behavior of China’s Young Internet Users”, the number of young Chinese Internet users — those who are younger than 25 — rose almost 17 percent to 195 million from the end of 2008 to 2009. In addition, this group accounts for 51 percent of all Internet users in China. There’s also a 24 percent increase in mobile phone usage to access the Web; currently, 74 percent of these youngsters access the Web through phones.

Young Chinese Internet users spend lots of time on gaming. Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomwire/

More highlights from the CNNIC survey:

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• Internet penetration for China’s young population now stands at 54.5 percent.

Google China Stops Censoring Search Results, Points to Google Hong Kong

You may call it fulfilling of an earlier promise or you may call it defiance over a bigger authority but Google has finally removed censored search results on its China search engine since early today. A blog posted by Google on its official blog indicated that everyone accessing its Google China site (google.cn) site will now be redirected to Google Hong Kong (google.com.hk) and will be able to access Web search, news search and image search with no restrictions applied.

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Google, Yahoo, Bing Lost Search Engine Market Share in China in 2009

Even before the highly publicized news about Google’s bold plan to produce uncensored search results in China, its popularity in the mainland has been dwindling. This is according to iResearch, a local Chinese search consultancy firm.

In addition to Google losing search market share in mainland, Yahoo! and Bing also lost a certain portion of their slices in search popularity in China. Google had 18.9 per cent share of Web searches done in China in 2009, compared to 76 per cent enjoyed by Baidu. In terms of percentage points, Google’s share is down 1.8 per cent while Baidu gained 2.8 percentage points, iResearch said.

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