Baidu has recently launched another vertical search engine for Chinese softwares. Baidu Software Search indexes both desktop softwares and mobile applications.

Also read::Baidu Launched Baidu Mobile Apps

Tudou.com, one of the leading video portal in China, two weeks ago announced their parntership with VivaKi, digital media operations of the worldwide Publicis Groupe, to roll out a new online video advertising format called “AdSelector” in the China market.

Tudou is one of the first Internet media companies to partner in this live test and has seen positive feedback from users who were introduced to the new format.

AdSelector allows users to select their preferred video advertising before watching a program. Since including pre-roll, a small trailer of advertising, has become the standard and the most popular video ad format globally, Tudou has worked closely with VivaKi to enhance the experience and introduce this innovate format by giving users more choices.

The AdSelector format had been tested in the U.S. market and is already applied by Hulu. As an expanding initiative, Publicis is introducing the new format and collaborating with top media partners in selected markets to test and collect more case studies.

Based on the prior research, the AdSelector format delivered click-through rates that were 106 percent higher than pre-roll ads. The online ad-recall scores were 290 percent higher than pre-rolls. Aside from Hulu, MSNBC.com and Yahoo.com in the U.S. market are said to launch AdSelector in the next few months.

Tudou, together with VivaKi China, are working together to close the gap of ad technology innovations to create a better user experience for the Chinese netizens while delivering value and ROI to advertisers on its platform.

Top tier brands such as GE, Lancôme, General Mills, Dettol and Veet joined the AdSelector roll-out on Tudou.com. All data will be collected and analyzed to determine Chinese user feedback to this specific new format. So far around 80% users who were exposed to AdSelector on Tudou have responded positively to the experience.

via Tudou

Also read::Nearly 9 out of 10 Internet Users in Hong Kong View Online Video

Baidu newly developed a PPC product called Xijing which is still in beta and similar to Google sitelinks extension.

Xijing displays on the left side of the search result page above the other SERPs. Different from “Baidu Promotion”, “Baidu Sponsor Link” and “Right Side Ads”, Xijing presents more information.

Besides title, description line 1 and line 2, Xijing allows three more text links directing to the different landing pages. Xijing makes sense to the advertisers that have multiple product lines, have several sub pages.

It is not clear whether it will be charged by fixed CPC like Baidu Targetisement, or the auction model. This product may be only available to advertisers in certain industries.

About Author: Crystal Sun is a Chinese search specialist at Incitez China. She is a certified Baidu search marketing professional and has a passion in digital marketing in China.

Also read::Baidu Launching Baidu 123 for Senior Citizens

A recent survey by Nielsen and CEMAC (Chinese Economic Monitoring & Analysis Center) showed consumer confidence slowing among those in cities, but steadily increasing among consumers in rural villages, who have a greater willingness to spend compared to those in larger cities.

The increasing confidence in rural areas was largely driven by “government policies designed to stimulate economic activity and increase income levels in rural areas during the first half of this year. The increase of minimum wages for migrant workers in some parts of China has also brightened rural consumers’ attitudes.

Source: Nielsen Wire

Also read::Consumer Confidence in China Back to Pre-Recession Levels

Tencent’s Q2 online advertising market share increased a lot after a fall in Q1 exceeding Sohu for the first time.

Source: Tencent

Also read::Online Advertising Market Share of Top 4 China Web Portals

Announced yesterday, Xinhua News Agency and China Mobile are setting up a mobile search company? “search engine new media international”. No details were given.

“The cooperation is an important move to serve the […] party and the state, thoroughly protect the national interest, safeguard China’s information security, strengthen the establishment of a public opinion front in the new media and broaden the domestic and overseas propaganda influence and the public opinion guidance capability of the Chinese mainstream media,” said Zhou Xisheng, Xinhua’s deputy publisher, according to the news agency’s own report. (via FT.com)

About Xinhua News Agency

Xinhua is China’s official news agency and the biggest center for collecting information and press conferences in China.

The tie-up’s impact on Baidu is very limited. But, as China Mobile is the country’s largest mobile operator, they could be a strong player in mobile search.

Also read::Over 117 Million Online Forum Users in China

From 2004 through 2009, credit card adoption in China has been growing an average of 40% annually, says Euromonitor International.

This rapid increase could soon make China Asia’s “most important card market,” says a 2009 report by McKinsey consulting firm.

Credit cards have grown especially quickly in China’s coastal areas during the past five years, “a clear illustration of the upside potential” of the market, says Emmanuel Pitsilis, a senior partner who heads McKinsey’s financial institutions practice in the greater China region.

The penetration of credit cards is directly related to consumers’ affluence, says Ivy Cheung, a Hong Kong-based executive director for Synovate, a market-research firm. So as Chinese consumers’ spending power grows, so will the size of the card market, she predicts.

via USA Today

Also read::China Online Shopping Statistics 2009 Part 2 – Top B2C Websites

More than 117 million people in China used online forums in 2009, according to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Since the 1990s, online forums have become an increasingly important gateway for expression of public opinion. Internet usage in rural areas, such as western China, has increased at a quicker rate than in more developed urban areas. China had 384 million internet users by the end of 2009.

Source: Xinhua News Agency via @AdAgeChina

Also read::China Internet Statistics 2009 Summary

According to a report released by iResearch last week, China search engine market Q2 sales increased to 2.64 billion yuan (US$389m). Baidu’s market share increased by 3% to 70.8%.

Search queries on Baidu also increased by 2.1% to 78.2% while search queries on Google dropped by 2.3% to 14.4%.

In China, the second quarter is the time when holiday is over and students go back to school; also with growing acceptance of Baidu’s phoenix nest system, it makes sense to see the Baidu’s market share has exceeded seventy percent.

Also read::China Q1 Online Payment Exceeded 212 Billion Yuan

In a recent report released by comScore, in terms of engagement among the top 20 most-visited properties in Asia Pacific, Tencent ranked as the most-engaging property with visitors averaging 6.5 hours on the site during the month, consuming 716 pages of content and visiting the property an average of 39 times.

Also read::Nearly 9 out of 10 Internet Users in Hong Kong View Online Video

Research from Fleishman-Hillard found that while internet users in China overwhelmingly felt more comfortable with companies that microblog, those in North America and the UK were largely unmoved.

China Internet users also show very positive attitude toward companies monitoring microblogs:

Edison Research found that while 87% of US consumers had heard of Twitter, only 7% used it. How many people have heard of microblogs? Still not many. Not to mention the number of users who frequently use it.

Also read::2008 China Laptop Market Internet Users Study

Tencent last week launched a new social networking website in China called “Peng You” which means “Friends” in English.

Pengyou clearly targets two groups of audience, “students” and “white collar workers”. At first login, users will be asked to select which group they belong to:

The “students” SNS features come from Tencent’s previous product called “QQ alumni”, which was launched last August and claimed to have 10 million registered users this January and 20 million in Feb.

After selecting “I’m studying” at first login, the user will be asked to register via one of two ways:

1. Get invitations from friends who’s already in qq alumni network (initially users can log in using their QQ instant messaging id and password at pengyou.qq.com)
2. Submit invitation code if any

For those who are working, they will be asked to register using their company email address. However, not all companies emails can be used to register at the moment. I tried a few; none worked. Got a tip from a friend, right now only Tencent’s company emails are accepted. It’s still in internal testing stage.

Social networking site is not new to Tencent as they have a very large social networking site called “Q Zone” which has over 428 million users by this March. The difference between qzone and pengyou is clear: qzone is a social network of qq instant messaging friends while pengyou is a network of friends in real life.

Also read::China social networking sites statistics 2009 (updated)

As Google’s Internet Content Provider (ICP) license is up for renewal on June 30 in China, Google now has a new approach to handle Google.cn visitors.

Since Google’s January announcement this year that Google was no longer willing to censor results on Google.cn, Google had automatically redirected everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese.

Google has started taking a small percentage of Google.cn users to a landing page on Google.cn that links to Google.com.hk (as shown in the above image). It’s a bit deceptive as it looks like a normal Google search box which in fact is an image that links to Google.com.hk.

Google has announced that over the next few days they’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all their Chinese users to the new landing page.

Also read::Google Search Dropped by Tencent

In a Youku poll to see what made the biggest impression on viewers of World Cup 2010, the vuvuzela takes the first place, with 22.5% of respondents (2,355 votes) voting for “The ear-splitting vuvuzelas” as the most striking feature of the matches so far.

You can check out the voting results here (Chinese).

Also read::Explore Shanghai World Expo on Google

China’s central bank on Monday said it would allow non-financial companies such as Alibaba, the country’s leading e-commerce company, to offer online payment services.

The move comes after months of uncertainty over whether the People’s Bank of China might severely curtail the business of AliPay, an affiliate of Alibaba. The central bank has been pushing Chinese banks to set up a common online payment settlement platform themselves that would compete with AliPay.

via FT.com

Also read::China Q1 Online Payment Exceeded 212 Billion Yuan

Baidu launched handwriting input on Baidu search not long ago this month. Searchers can use mouse to “hand write” search queries. The technology is obviously provided by Hanwang, a company specializing in handwriting recognition technology.

Also read::Baidu Adds Handwriting Support for The Senior

As little as 10 cents, you can “grow” your fan base in China social media such as Baidu Post Bar, blogs, micro-blogging platforms, etc.

With less than 3,000 yuan (USD 440), you can get tens of thousands of fans for your social media channels. And guess what? You can find many such sellers easily on Taobao.

Most sellers are quite “transparent” about their services; you don’t get true fans but you can very “real” fans with photos, locations, and profiles information. Of course, most of these fans have either one or no fans at all.

A few sellers seem very advanced. They provide huge number of fans (such as 30K) each of which has 5 to 300 fans, complete profile, and certain number of blog posts.

Where are those fans from? Team work. Some utilize the collective efforts from a team; some use software; and, some use both techniques.

Should you buy fans?

I don’t recommend you buy fans. If you do, you not only lie to others but also to yourself. What’s the point of building a business and making it look like attractive only to yourself?

If the number of fans increase too rapidly within a short time frame, it might trigger red flag and the administrator could shut down your account.

One thing you should have learned is, there are many people in China whose mind can be only in love with short term goals – quick money.

Also read::Baidu Post Bar Updated with Twitter Features

Chanced upon Sina’s smart “assassin” embedded in the feeds. Take a look at a normal blog post (above) first.

Atom OR RSS feeds are not popular in China; not at all though blog platforms like Sina Blog does provide RSS feeds (you can get it from firefox address bar for example) though it’s not obvious on the interface. Social networking sites like RenRen offers blog like function which also allows users to import blog posts by providing blog URL into its platform.

Sina inserts one line of texts with link to a special landing page promoting Sina Blog service:

I asked friends previously when I was importing self-hosted wordpress blog and no one actually realize I have a self-hosted blog, not to mention which platform I was using. The above imported blog post is in my current renren account and it’s a pretty good tactic from Sina to promote its blog service and win more users.

However, from usability perspective, it could confuse normal users and some may think blog author inserted it. On the other hand, Sina seems not ready to monetize the feeds yet.

Also read::Rumor: Microsoft to Acquire Sina

Baidu Zhidao, similar to Yahoo Answers, launched API platform. There are so far nine partners including abang.com (about.com in China) who have implemented Baidu Zhidao API.

Users can ask and answer questions across different websites directly or indirectly via its powerful APIs.

Baidu Zhidao APIs allows two types of partnership: one for high traffic volume, called channel partnership, provides not only APIs, but also free web space and data transfer. Channel partner websites users can log in with their own id and password to ask and answer questions, which will be synchronized with Baidu Zhidao.

The other partnership is for small to medium websites with similar features; but no free webspace or data transfer will be provided.

Baidu Zhidao Open

Also read::Baidu Launched Discovery Channel

comScore last week released its March 2010 rankings of the top video properties in Hong Kong based on data from its comScore Video Metrix service.

The report found that 88.5% of Hong Kong’s Internet population viewed video online in March, with visitors averaging more than 10 hours of video viewing per person during the month.

In March, Internet users in Hong Kong (age 15 and older) watched 447 million videos, with Google Sites ranking as the top video property with 234.2 million videos, representing 52.4 percent of all videos viewed online. YouTube.com accounted for more than 99% of all videos viewed at the Google property.

Tudou Sites ranked second with 16.3 million videos viewed, representing 3.6 percent of the market, followed closely by Youku with 16.2 million videos, also at 3.6 percent. Facebook.com (12.3 million videos, 2.8 percent share) and Oriental Press Group (6.4 million videos, 1.4 percent share) rounded out the top five.

More than 3.6 million viewers in Hong Kong watched an average of 123 videos per viewer during the month of March. Google Sites attracted the largest video audience with 2.4 million unique viewers during the month (97.5 videos per viewer), followed by Facebook.com with 1.3 million viewers (9.6 videos per viewer) and Youku with 786, 000 viewers (20.6 videos per viewer).

Source: comScore

Also read::Hong Kong Internet user spends over 25 hours online per month