China online Ads market to grow 50% in 2008
China Web 2.0 Review has a write-up summarizing the China section of the new JPMorgan ¡°Nothing but Net¡± report from Morgan¡¯s Internet analyst Imran Khan and his team, which many of us probably read about yesterday on TechCrunch. The highlight of the China section? Fast growth in the total online ad market (China online Ads,branded ads, email, and pay-per-click) of 50% in 2008, driven by Olympic-related spend, taking the total to $1.441 billion¨Cto 8.2% of total ad spending in China, up from 2007¡¯s 6.7%. Branded ad spend will rise by 38% this year, but the real growth driver will be the pay-per-click search market, which will surge by 82% this year, JPMorgan estimates, to $562 million¨Cwith Baidu taking the lion¡¯s share, to no one¡¯s surprise, with 65%-70% of the market.
Total China online Ads spend growth will slow to 36% in ¡®09 by JPMorgan¡¯s reckoning, and to 37% and 33% in the two subsequent years. But that will take the estimated total by 2011 to north of $3.56 billion, or 13.5% of total projected ad spending in that year. These aren¡¯t the most sanguine projections that I¡¯ve seen. There are those who don¡¯t see quite the drop in growth post-Olympics that this forecast posits, and who see the China online ads market clipping along at 40-50% growth for the next four years to put the total by 2011 at over $5 billion. Here¡¯s hoping the optimists are right.
Specialized online game media has achieved fastest development among all specialized online media. There were only a few specialized online game media like 17173 and Angel Online in 2003. By the end of 2004, nearly 10 specialized online game media had reached a certain size. Likewise, auto media is growing fast too. In addition to early entrants such as chinacars.com and qiche.com, several new auto community media like xcar.com have been introduced. The economic value of traffic leads to the uprising of online community media At the beginning of 2004, the online advertising industry was shocked when Tianqiao Chen suggested that Shanda was also an advertising media due to its huge user base and further declared that Shanda was ready to enter into China online Ads market. However, industrial insiders were convinced when Shanda got an ads contract valued RMB 40 million from eBay/Eachnet. The deal also indicated that online communities with large traffic could present high advertising value. A group of online communities headed by Xilu, Xici, Tianyaclub and MOP have achieved outstanding traffic. However, their online ads revenue hasn¡¯t reflected their value yet. China online Ads in such communities and new communities like Blog will show great development potential future. Rapid development of online advertising agencies results in increasing specialization Online advertising agencies grew fast in 2004.