Posts by: Doug Pierce
Less people are searching for Chinese e-commerce discount retailer VIPShop (VIPS) on Baidu. An analysis of a basket of 22 popular VIPShop branded queries - queries that have VIPShop’s Chinese name “唯品会” in them - indicate a 6.9% weighted average drop in search volume on Baidu over the past quarter. Search volume is a more…
The Qihoo 360 Safe Browser surpassed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer last November to become the most widely used web browser in China. Not only has the three year old browser now hit 57% market penetration, but achieved its dominance in record time.
An onomatopoeia for the sound of a sneeze, Qihoo is best known for…
Even with the effects of a global financial crisis, volcanic ash clouds over Europe, and earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, there’s still a bright spot for online travel portals: Asia-Pacific, the fastest growing travel market worldwide and where only 22% of customers have booked online. While China and India have clear leaders with Ctrip and…
Is Baidu heading toward death by a thousand cuts?
There isn’t a lot in Baidu’s immediate future to be worried about: the Chinese search giant has 75% of China’s search market share, reported a 95% surge in profits for the second quarter, and with Google long gone, no other search engine poses a credible threat….
“Tweeting’s so yesterday,” declared a headline in China Daily from June of last year, an obvious pronouncement in a country with Twitter blocked and only 10 million of its one-billion-plus population on microblogs. The story featured Sina Weibo, a new microblog platform from a company better known for its news portal, and talked…
The social media craze in China has claimed another casualty: Baidu Shuoba. The Twitter-like service, which had suspended new user sign-ups in May, announced they would completely shut down at the end of this month. Baidu was late to the game and didn’t bring anything new to the table.
Shuoba launched a year ago coinciding…
The bargain implicit between webmaster and widget maker is as follows: webmasters get a plug-and-play solution to provide their visitors dynamic content or specialized functionality, while the widget maker in return reaches a broader audience and extends its brand.
The seventh most popular travel website in France, VoyagerMoinsCher.com (VMC), goes one step further and uses…
Baidu has taken a lot of flak over its failure to adequately protect intellectual property. China’s most visited website has in the past year been sued by a domestic writers guild, Japanese manga publisher, international music labels, and put on a list of “notorious market” for counterfeit and pirated goods by the US Trade Representative….
HomeAway goes public in a few days. This well-funded company (they’ve raised about half a billion dollars) has gotten some attention. What’s gotten less attention is that they’re an increasingly mature player in the industry. Although they sport a high revenue growth rate and good margins, many aspects of their business model simply aren’t sustainable.
Qunar is at the top rung of what is arguably the most lucrative and competitive niche in search: the online travel market in China. The company ranked first last March among Chinese travel websites in terms of daily page views, appears on the first pages of Baidu and Google.com.hk for generic travel keywords, and stands…
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