Shane Farley

Baidu vs. Google: Who's the #1 Country-Specific Search Engine?

Your right, Baidu does have issues with liking to mp3 tracks that are copyrighted. Google also has problems with the same thing, and they have issues with people posting copyrighted material on Youtube. Thus far the Chinese court system hasn't punished sites too badly for this, instead electing to focus on shutting down the sites that actual host the copyrighted material. This is how Baidu prefers to have this enforced as they dont want to be responsible for checking copyrights on the billions of pages they index as its a massive feat. Lawsuits against Baidu are for small amounts of money and the judgment against Yahoo China was for less than $30k. Alexa.com and ChinaRank.com only show Baidu's MP3 channel getting 6% of their total traffic so switching to fully ad supported might hurt traffic a little but wont kill them by any means. It will probably just give them another great revenue stream. Baidu recently put out a press release in Japan about how they are partnering with 70 music labels and their cfo was interviewed on CFO.com recently about their music model and made strong comments about their ad supported music system that they want to go forward with. The article I wrote was simply meant to point out how Baidu gets more search queries in China than Google does in the USA. I own more money in Google shares than Baidu fyi but can't help but be impressed with the growth of the Chinese web and Baidu's opportunities.

BNP Paribas put out and sec filing today taking a 7.8% stake in baidu. Morgan Stanley owns around 9%, etc. Baidu is attracting major money.