Baidu plans to cash in on non-search services

Baidu Inc, the biggest search engine in China, plans to generate revenues from non-search services, in an effort to further cash in on its huge traffic, said a company official.

The company is going to generate revenues from Baidu Tieba, an online forum that contributes "much of Baidu’s total traffic", said Xiang Hailong, Baidu’s vice-president in charge of commercial operations.

Baidu Tieba will enable the company's clients to do online marketing through interaction with the forum’s users, said Xiang, who leads the project.

This is a new way of generating revenues for Baidu, which takes up more than 80 percent of China’s search traffic. The company currently makes money mainly from its search service, in which clients pay for the traffic driven by Baidu’s links.

However, You Tianyu, an Internet analyst with research company iResearch, said Baidu Tieba’s DNA as an online forum may not make it a natural place to do online marketing, unlike social networking sites.

Baidu has been making efforts to generate revenues apart from its core service, amid fierce competition from rivals, such as Sina Corp, which runs the popular Twitter-like service Sina Weibo in China.

Baidu took up 78.5 percent of the country's search market, in terms of revenues, in the first quarter, followed by Google Inc’s 16.6 percent, according to domestic research company Analysys International.