Baidu: Gets the Yahoo Panama Flu
October 28, 2009
I don’t want to make too much of the Baidu goof. The company indicated that its new ad platform has caused the firm to stub its toe. You can read the explanation in “Baidu’s Rare Stumble Offers Google Opportunities” and get the scoop. Last week I was asked to provide a breakdown of Google’s technical investment in its ad platform. I turned to my patent document analysis and reported that Google has continued to invest in the plumbing and numerical recipes that fuel its third party payer system. No big surprise to me. Ad revenue makes up 98 percent of the firm’s revenue. Even Google knows that it has to baby this system or Googzilla will shrivel up and die. What struck me is that Baidu has Panama flu. As you may recall, Yahoo’s oh-so-confident technologists promised that Yahoo’s new ad platform would enable the company to compete better with Google. Panama finally wobbled out of the starting gate after years in gestation. Yahoo continued to fall behind the Google. Now Baidu shows similar symptoms. What these two examples communicate to me is that Google’s ad platform is in place and working. The Google upgrades that platform with regular injections of wizardry and so far has not caught the Panama flu. Maybe the online ad systems are more tricky than some engineers believe. Now Baidu’s misstep may give Google a pry bar to use in the China market?
Stephen Arnold, October 28, 2009
Not even a dog treat for Tess for this write up.
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