June 23, 2006
Amid the hoopla of Digg’s expansion into general interest news website, TechCrunch emerged as one of the most enthusiastic cheerleaders.
Based on data from a web traffic monitor Alexaholic, TechCrunch gushes that “Digg is looking more and more like the newspaper of the web, and is challenging even the New York Times on page views.” Well, a closer look at the graph merely reveals a somewhat similar viewing pattern between the NYT and Digg, with NYT viewership far outnumbers that for Digg.
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From the market that’s “bigger on promise than profit” back to the promising market on news, user-generated kind.
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CNet reports that Digg, the tech-news phenomenon that has users decide what is newsworthy, will unveil a revamped public beta site on Monday, June 26, expanding beyond technology news and letting people “dig” videos too.
Jay Adelson, chief executive of Digg, said, “We have completely changed the back end of Digg, (using) a whole new architecture” that allows users to go beyond technology news to sumbit “world events, business, entertainment, science and gaming,” as well as videos on the site.
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The Google-Baidu split piqued our interest, so we dug a little further and summarized the findings on the market that’s known as “bigger on promise than profit.” The search market leader, Baidu, last year made less than $6m (Rmb47.6m), but it was a nearly fourfold increase over the previous year.
Typically, online advertising practice in China involves buying banner space on a website with payments dependent on how long the ad stayed there, noted by China Economic Review. This has made well-used portals such as Sina and Sohu very rich, but the future is likely to see significant growth in pay-for-performance (P4P) advertising on the search engines. “The portals have had it easy charging US$5,000 a month for a banner ad,” said Richard Robinson, vice president at wireless value-added service (WVAS) provider Linktone, but “I think as the advertisers and agencies become more educated they are going to demand more results and data.”
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FT reports today that Google has severed its financial ties with Baidu, the Chinese search engine, “clearing the way for the two companies to compete head-on for the country’s vast internet users.”
According to Shanghai consultancy iResearch, as of year end 2005, there were 111 million Internet users in China, up 18.1% on 2004. Analysts expects this number to reach 338 million by 2010, as China supplants the US as the world’s largest Internet market. The Internet penetration rate, currently around 10%, will break 25% in 2010, with penetration among the 200 million or so middle class closer to the 70%-plus level seen in the US.
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