E-Media Tidbits

Google Google is losing market share in the coveted Chinese internet.

Can any large U.S. Internet company succeed on its own China? The record is not encouraging.

Billsdue, a leading commentator on China's internet, mentioned this Sept. 13 Red Herring report which indicates that Google has started to lose market share in China. Even worse, Google is losing ground with China's high-end user segment, where previously it dominated Baidu (China's largest domestic search engine).

Baidu has always attracted the most eyeballs in China, but those belong mostly to penniless youngsters searching for illegal MP3 downloads.

Red Herring reports that Google has been losing out in key markets like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, according to the research company IntelliConsulting.

In Beijing, the only city for which detailed results were made available, Baidu's market share rose by 13 percent from one year ago to 65.4 percent, the survey showed. Google fell by 12.3 percent, from 32.9 percent to 20.6 percent.

That is a rather dramatic drop -- and bad news for a company that only started to invest seriously in China at the beginning of this year. Moving into China had brought the US company only bad news, as they are losing the strong position they had before they were present in China.

Billsdue correctly points out that other U.S. giants, Yahoo and eBay, have similar bad records in China.