Google China Partners With Sina

Written by Tangos on June 12, 2007
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Google China and Sina announced an important partnership for each other today. They will cooperate on search, news and advertising service. Sina has added Google search service into its website, which will direct Sina’s search traffic to Google, then share the search advertising revenue with Google. Google may also offer Adsense ads. in Sina’s website later. The cooperation will be extended into news and other areas in the future.

Google partners with SinaI believe that this partnership means a lot for both companies. Since Google came to China, to partner with heavy-traffic website has been one of its most important strategy, so Google has cooperated with Netease, QQ and China.com. Though Netease will not renew its cooperation with Google because it will launch its own Yodao search engine, the new partnership with Sina will ensure its traffic and market share will not be affected. In the mean time, I think the cooperation with Sina will facilitate its future negotiation with other potential partners.

After cooperation, Sina will still retain its iAsk search engine for news search, blog search, image search and iAsk Answer community. However, I think the cooperation has announce the failure of search strategy of Sina. Sina rolled out its own iAsk search engine in 2005, after it terminated search service cooperation with various service provider, as Baidu and Zhongsou. But after two-year operation, iAsk only gained a very small market share. To cooperate with Google, Sina can refocus on its core services to explore its online advertising business, while enjoying an important share of search advertising revenue from Google’s Adwords/Adsense service, then increase Sina’s revenue and bottom line.

Another question on the partnership is why Google, not Baidu? Well, I think, at first, Baidu is becoming an important threat to Sina and other portals, not mention its threat to Google China. So the common interests make them to form alliance to compete with Baidu. Secondly, some of Google’s ads products are better than those of Baidu, for example, Google’s Adsense performs better than Baidu’s similar service, then revenue from Google Adsense would be more satisfactory.

(photo from Sina)

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