It’s a pretty well-known fact that Baidu’s beaten Google in China, and all of Google’s efforts to reverse that fact haven’t accomplished much. Unfortunately for the company, those efforts also failed to hold off another rival, as a new report puts Alibaba ahead of Google in the online ad market.
Owen Fletcher wrote earlier today, "In a breakdown of Chinese online advertising market share, Beijing research firm Analysys International says Alibaba has overtaken Google for second place behind Baidu thanks in large part to its online shopping unit Taobao."
Then Fletcher continued, "Alibaba now owns a 9.3% market share and the number two spot in China’s online ad market, according to Analysys International (Word doc). Meanwhile, Analysys says, Google’s share fell 2 percentage points from the second quarter, when it held the number-two spot, to 8.9% in the third quarter."
For its part, Baidu ended the third quarter with a market share of 30.1 percent.
Google wasn’t much luckier in the search market, either as its market share fell from 24.2 percent to 21.6 percent while Baidu’s share rose to 73.0 percent.
That’s bad news for the search giant, which has by and large begun to play by China’s rules since it backed down on its threat to leave the country. The attraction of 1.3 billion potential users was huge, to be sure, but if Google compromised its morals and fails to make much money, the situation becomes lose-lose.