The Google of China: Baidu Business Model In A Nutshell
Baidu makes money primarily via online marketing services (advertising). In fact, in 2017 Baidu made about $11.24 in online marketing services and a remaining almost $1.8 billion through other sources. According to Statista, Baidu has an overall search market share of 73.8% of the Chinese market. Other sources of revenues comprise membership services of iQIYI (an innovative market-leading online entertainment service provider in China) and financial services.
The tech market in China has grown exponentially in the last decade. In fact, of the 20 world’s largest tech companies China has nine of them. Companies like Alibaba reached hundreds of billion dollars in market capitalization. As Google shut down its search engine back in 2010 due to the Chinese Government censorship that opened up a huge hole that allowed Baidu to build up the most successful search engine in the country. Baidu in a way tried to replicate (with a certain amount of success) Google. Both concerning search and in terms of business model. A few know that Baidu founder was the first one to put together a link based search engine. Google in 2018 is entering the Chinese search market again.
Baidu Core business is search. However, it also operates on the broader internet market space. That implies a list of competitors like Tencent, Alibaba, Sohu, Qihoo 360, ByteDance, Xiaomi, and iFly Technology.
- Baidu origin story
- How does Baidu make money?
- What are the main challenges for Baidu?
- What are the Baidu business segments?
- Who are Baidu key partners?
- What are Baidu core products?
- Online marketing services based on search queries:
- Baidu Cloud services
- Autonomous Driving
- iQIYI (the Chinese YouTube)
- Who are Baidu’s main competitors?
- How does Baidu work?
- Link Analysis
- Ranking system
- Information Extraction
- Web Crawling
- Natural Language Processing
- MIP (Mobile Instant Pages)
- Summary and conclusions
