Baidu Signs Up Sony-Ericsson To Further Expand Wireless Search

June 30, Shanghai

China's largest search engine company Baidu has signed agreement with Sony-Ericsson to collaborate in mobile search field. Previously, Baidu has already signed agreement with Nokia in January.

The agreement calls for integrating Baidu.zhidao, Baidu.post, Baidu.local and other wireless services into SE mobile phones. Sony-Ericsson will also try to expand SE-Baidu applications into other related areas.

Source: Donews

Huatong 140 Updates(4)

Huatong 140 Index of weekday keyword pricing survey came in at 4.8340. It is up 6% from the original value set four weeks ago.

Initial : 4.5581
Week 1: 4.6724
Week 2: 4.7189
Week 3: 4.7194
Week 4: 4.8340

HI.baidu.com To Be Rolled Out In July

Reported in tech.tom.com, Baidu will roll out a major product in July.

The major product is rumored to be a personal portal, HI.baidu.com which is similar to Google personal home page or space.msn.com.

A personal blogging, album as well as friends' circle will be added to existing Baidu services. The personal portal may also require login similar to a Google account.

Huatong 150 Index Updates(4)

The weekend survey of keyword pricing on Baidu's search marketing network on June 24 came in at 3.8520. It was up strongly from four weeks ago by 4.35%.

Huatong 140 Updates(3)

Weekly keyword pricing index Huatong 140 was almost unchanged.

Initial : 4.5581
Week 1: 4.6724
Week 2: 4.7189
Week 3: 4.7194

Shanghai to launch citywide IPTV services in September

2006-06-20
SHANGHAI will launch citywide broadband-based TV services in September for the first time as more partners have been roped in and Internet access speed has improved, Shanghai Media Group said yesterday.

At present, IPTV services (Internet Protocol TV), which offer live broadcast channels, video-on-demand programs, weather broadcasts and information on traffic and restaurants, are only available in the city's Minhang District and Pudong New Area with about 100,000 users.

"We will officially launch it (IPTV) in September after Shanghai Telecom finishes upgrading the local network, from 1 megabit to 2M or 3M a second," said Wang Zuogong, vice president of BestTV, an IPTV subsidiary of SMG, the sole national IPTV operation license owner.

Meanwhile, BestTV signed an agreement with Baidu.com, the most popular Chinese-language Internet search engine, to put Baidu's ask-and-answer column "Baidu Knows" in BestTV's IPTV package, which charges users a monthly flat rate of 30 yuan (US$3.75).

"The cooperation creates the magical charm of a combined computer and TV platform," said Wang, who added the firm is seeking more Internet Website partners.

On Sunday, BestTV signed an accord with Hong Kong TVB, a free-to-air broadcaster, to provide users with TVB programs, said Wang.

IPTV's adoption user number is expected to reach 5.7 million in China this year, triple last year's level. The number will jump to 16.5 million in 2008, according to iResearch Inc, a Shanghai-based IT research firm.

Shanghai Telecom uses ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber loop) services to transfer IPTV data. The telco, with more than 1 million local ADSL family users, said it gives IPTV subscribers free set-top boxes to connect the traditional TV to the broadband network.

Although China's IPTV industry will grow rapidly based on 26 million broadband users (by 2005), it still faces problems like uncertain policies and high costs, according to Nancy Dang, iSuppli Corp's analyst.

The breakeven income for IPTV every month is 85 yuan, much higher than the current price level about 30 yuan, according to Dang.

Liang Dong, Baidu's vice president, said the agreement with BestTV doesn't cover profit distribution as IPTV is still at the stage of starting up in China.

Zhu Shenshen from Shanghai Daily

Baidu Teams Up With SMG To Develop IPTV Contents

June 19, Shanghai - Baidu and Shanghai Media Group signed agreeement of overall collabration on developing contents for IPTV. Shanghai Media Group is one of the largest media group as well as the earliest IPTV operator in China.

According to the agreement, Baidu Zhidao, the famous commnuity based knowledge search service will be applied to SMG's IPTV platform. As the leading Chinese search engine, Baidu will also help SMG to develop a series search related services based on the IPTV platform.

"Baidu aims to provide the fastest and easiest way to acquire information for users. Our hope is that users will be able to use various Baidu search services not only from PC, but also from wide range of digital home terminals" said Liang Dong, Baidu's vice president of public relationship. "in IPTV area, SMG is the pioneer as well as the heavist investor with the most extensive experiences. We are proud to be able to work with SMG, to extend web contents to IPTV and to promote the development of related contents as well as technologies in China."

"IPTV, content is the king. SMG is always trying to take advantages of the interactive way of IPTV to provide more and better contents for our audiences" said Zhang Dazhong, SMG's vice president. "Baidu is a new media company built up on technologies. Every search result page is resulted from interaction with users. 'Baidu Zhidao' is a knowledge area produced by community interactions. Our collaboration with Baidu is based on their experiences with search technologies, management and development of interactive contents."

Baidu and SMG jointly annnouced that they will further expand their market promotions to bring their collaboration also to other partners including equipment manufactures and telecom operators, and to further grow the eco-system.

translated from prnewswire(chinese)

Huatong 150 Index Update (3)

The Huatong 150 Index saw a slightly drop on Saturday.

27-May	3.6914
3-Jun	3.7097
10-Jun	3.7654
17-Jun	3.7578

Prices in the higher bracket (3.00 higher) dropped while the lower bracket (3.00 lower) continue to see a strong upward move. The eighty lower priced keywords saw 6.9% jump in average comparing with those surveyed on May 27.

Baidu Gains Significantly in China's Search Market

We have posted iResearch's summary on China's Search Market here in May. Here is the figure by iResearch:

The iReseach figure shows that Baidu captured 26% of China's search market revenues in 2005.

Yesterday, Analysys published it's recent survey in China's search market:


From the above figure, Baidu has now captured 43.9% in China's search market revenue in the first quarter of 2006. It is 65% higher than that of 2005.

Since June 1, 2006, Baidu has in fact increased the minimum bid on many hot contested keywords. The new bidding rule requires that in order to appear on the first page of search result, a search marketer must bid higher than existing minimum price paid by other marketers. At the same time, some less contested keywords also saw lowered minimum bid requirement.

Huatong140 Continue Strong Move

June 13, 2006

The second weekday keyword pricing survey, the Huatong140 Index continued it's strong uptrend. The reading came in at 4.7189. It is up a very strong 3.53% from two weeks ago.

One week ago , it was at 4.6724 or 2.51% comparing to the Index's initial value at 4.5581.

Keyword Pricing Update

Weekend survey of Baidu's keyword pricing came in at 3.7654. Up 2% from two weeks ago.

The Huatong 150 Index started on May 27 at 3.6914.

The Index was 3.7097 on June 3.

On a separate news, Baidu expanded it's map service to 17 more cities in China.

Baidu Won Exclusive Web Sponsorship, Push "Supergirl" Frenzy Across China

Beijing June 7

Yesterday, many "supergirl" fans may have noticed that, the web partner for Hunan TV's Super Girl event has shown up on the screen and it is Baidu. Baidu has promised to establish bulletin boards for each of the top ten finishers and will hold promotional activities. Baidu is the exclusive partner on the web for this year's Super Girl event. Baidu has moved to the front line for the "Supergirl" contest on the web this year from behind the scene last year.

In 2005, Baidu luckily picked some falling fruits. Though not a former partner for Super Girl, Baidu became the real king only without the crown on the web. In the last moment of contest between the three super girls, Li Yuchun, Zhou Bichang, and Zhang Liangying, daily visits surpassed 3.5 million to the "Supergirl" bulletin boards on Baidu. Over 2 million messages were posted. Every post can have hundreds or thousands of following posts. A new post can be buried in a few minutes even with "ten people's effort to push the post back to top".

Right after the bulletin board frenzy, the Sixth Pepsi Music Contest invited Baidu to jointly promote brands. According to related data, the number of quality posts on Baidu's bulletin board was equivalent to the total number of posts in all the Chinese web communities combined. In less than two month, fans participating in the Pepsi Music contest had contributed over tens of millions of valuable contents. Some posts had received over tens millions views and tens of million of following responses.

The magnitude of the visits is probably the main power that have pushed Super Girl and other events to dump other large portals, and turn to Baidu for partnership.

This year, Baidu's "Supergirl" bulletin boards continue to be superhot. So far, there are already over one thousand boards related to Super Girl event with over 60 million messages posted. The formally teaming up of Supergirl sponsor Hunan TV with Baidu will provide web users fast and reliable news and interactive participation. It will also provide multi-dimensional "Supergirl" experience for the fans. At the same time, Baidu indicated that the autonomous management style will continue for all the bulletin boards. Net users will own the bulletin boards without Baidu's interference on contents.

Experts say that the connection of Supergirl with "Baidu Bulletin boards" is not only a simple relationship between content and platform, but also a sharing of a common nature - that is interactivity. "Baidu Bulletin" is a free space to best express personal feelings. On "Baidu Bulletin", people can most satisfy their desire of expression: Only when your expression is well received, there will be many to listen and follow.


Source: Baidu

Huatong140 Index Going Up

The first weekday survey after we established Huatong140 Index of keyword pricing found that the keyword pricing on Baidu's network is going pretty strong.

From May 29 to June 5, the Huatong140 Index jumped from 4.5581 to 4.6724 or 2.51%. Of course, one week's data will not be enough to show the trend. Let's wait and see what happens on June 12.

Fourty one keywords were priced lower, and eighty six keywords were priced higher in the Index. Thirteen of them were not changed.

High Priced Keywords

Besides Huatong150 and Huatong140 index that we plan to survey during weekend and weekdays, we also plan to look at a different angle. We would like to see changes in those highly priced keywords. The new index we'd like to call it Huatong High Index.

The High Index consists of 43 highly priced keywords which starts at 8.00 yuan minimum (or $1.00 dollar per clickthrough). This index is heavily weighted in industrial, business and legal areas and thus could be volatile and biased.

However, the movement of this High Index could indicate how affordable the Baidu search advertising is to the businesses in China.

Keyword	1st	2nd	3rd	Ave(0529)	Ave(0605)	Change
1	8.57	8.54	7.02	8.04	7.44	-7.5%
2	8.06	8.04	8.04	8.05	8.08	0.5%
3	8.23	8.23	8.22	8.23	8.31	1.0%
4	8.60	8.59	8.58	8.59	9.77	13.7%
5	8.67	8.65	8.65	8.66	8.69	0.3%
6	8.90	8.70	8.51	8.70	8.78	0.9%
7	15.97	5.16	5.15	8.76	8.78	0.2%
8	11.02	8.00	7.99	9.00	8.27	-8.2%
9	9.10	9.10	9.06	9.09	9.36	3.0%
10	12.00	8.02	7.52	9.18	11.62	26.6%
11	9.41	9.32	9.25	9.33	9.30	-0.3%
12	9.57	9.45	9.13	9.38	9.65	2.8%
13	9.55	9.52	9.51	9.53	9.51	-0.1%
14	10.00	9.50	9.18	9.56	9.26	-3.2%
15	9.65	9.65	9.64	9.65	9.88	2.4%
16	10.03	10.02	10.00	10.02	10.91	8.9%
17	10.03	10.02	10.01	10.02	10.03	0.1%
18	10.04	10.03	10.03	10.03	10.11	0.8%
19	10.05	10.05	10.04	10.05	10.06	0.2%
20	10.11	10.11	10.11	10.11	10.23	1.2%
21	10.51	10.10	9.93	10.18	10.57	3.9%
22	10.72	10.71	10.70	10.71	11.04	3.1%
23	10.98	10.97	10.50	10.82	10.95	1.3%
24	11.00	10.80	10.79	10.86	11.00	1.3%
25	10.99	10.89	10.88	10.92	11.01	0.8%
26	11.50	11.20	11.10	11.27	11.40	1.2%
27	11.36	11.36	11.35	11.36	11.38	0.2%
28	11.50	11.50	11.49	11.50	12.09	5.2%
29	13.43	13.42	13.41	13.42	9.42	-29.8%
30	14.50	14.50	13.20	14.07	14.00	-0.5%
31	15.27	15.26	15.26	15.26	15.60	2.2%
32	19.93	15.30	15.20	16.81	15.31	-8.9%
33	17.88	17.87	16.00	17.25	17.92	3.9%
34	18.50	18.44	18.43	18.46	18.52	0.3%
35	19.35	19.22	18.21	18.93	18.54	-2.0%
36	20.00	19.32	19.10	19.47	20.01	2.8%
37	21.38	21.38	21.38	21.38	21.63	1.2%
38	25.10	24.62	24.62	24.78	25.14	1.5%
39	26.01	25.00	25.01	25.34	27.20	7.3%
40	27.03	27.00	25.54	26.52	27.06	2.0%
41	30.00	29.95	28.52	29.49	30.18	2.3%
42	35.85	35.35	23.70	31.63	35.88	13.4%
43	32.65	32.51	32.50	32.55	33.03	1.5%
Average				13.8824	14.1150
Change					1.68%

The Huatong High Index was up 1.68% for last week.

Huatong150 Index Unchanged

The second weekend reading of Huatong150 Index is almost unchanged. The Index included 150 common keywords that spread widely in different areas of daily supply, IT, industrial supply, education as well as legal, etc.

The initial reading was 3.6914 surveyed on May 27. The second reading was 3.7079 surveyed on June 3. The change was less than 1/2 of one percent.

What does this mean?

A picture worth a thousand words!

1.	Taiyuan Mainland China
2.	Hohhot Mainland China
3.	Shijiazhuang Mainland China
4.	Luoyang Mainland China
5.	Changchun Mainland China
6.	Harbin Mainland China
7.	Shenyang Mainland China
8.	Jinan Mainland China
9.	Zhengzhou Mainland China
10.	Xian Mainland China

Beautiful picture shows a strong trend.

What trend? If you wonder, this clearly shows a large crowd in China are moving either away from Google to Baidu, or at least to use Baidu as alternative choice when they are not satisfied by Google's result. Simply put, people search Baidu on Google are not looking anything about Baidu, but to search further using Baidu search engine !

Baidu prospers on their own. They deserve full credit for creating the best Chinese search engine. Google is in denial by saying people move to Baidu because Google is less accessible.