The phrase ‘think global, act local’ will literally have to be translated into a few different languages to reach and engage the culturally diverse Asian populations. Notably on the Internet, where China has more online searchers than any other market in the region and the Koreans have made the highest number of searches per user, marginally ahead of the Australians and Japanese.
comScore‘s July ranking of top search properties in the Asia-Pacific markets revealed that Chinese search engine Baidu.com is separated from top-placed Google by only 6% market share, out of more than 27 billion searches conducted in the month. This is in spite of the US Internet giant’s online dominance and extensive localization efforts in the multi-lingual region.
Baidu is no doubt gaining on Google’s tenuous lead in the Asia Pacific if one considers that comScore’s data excludes searches from Internet cafes, where millions of sociable Chinese like to gather for their daily online fix.
Niko Partners estimates there’re about 21.9 million PCs installed in China’s 185,000 internet cafes.
comScore’s qSearch 2.0 service for July 2008 showed that Google currently leads the Asia-Pacific online search with 33.5% market share, ahead of 2nd-placed Baidu and followed by Yahoo! sites in third position with 19.7% search share.
|
Top 10 Asia-Pacific Search Properties |
||
|
Top 10 Properties |
Searches (MM) |
Share of Searches |
|
Total Internet** |
27,059 |
100.0 |
|
Google Sites |
9,073 |
33.5 |
|
Baidu.com Inc. |
7,406 |
27.4 |
|
Yahoo! Sites |
5,342 |
19.7 |
|
NHN Corporation |
1,239 |
4.6 |
|
Alibaba.com Corporation |
823 |
3.0 |
|
TENCENT Inc. |
513 |
1.9 |
|
Microsoft Sites |
457 |
1.7 |
|
Lycos Sites |
418 |
1.5 |
|
Sohu.com Inc. |
305 |
1.1 |
*Excludes searches from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.
**Improvements to universe estimates in certain Internet markets have recently been made. We caution against trending with data prior to July 2008.
Out of the top 10 search sites, 4th-ranked NHN Corp. takes the lion’s share of the Korean market while there’re four Chinese search service providers (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Sohu).
This correlates with the search volume from the top 10 countries, which form the bulk of the region’s Chinese-speaking populations, namely from China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore.
*Excludes searches from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.
**Improvements to universe estimates in certain Internet markets have recently been made. We caution against trending with data prior to July 2008.
