Invite colleagues
Baidu.com changed their policies on its Baidu Alliance Program this week and the result will be a reduction in the number of publishers being able to leverage the Baidu ad content. The reports on the local media suggest the members affected are mainly non-contracted website navigation sites and the traffic involved is about one million daily visitors.
So where many sites failed to gain direct advertising dollars they simply turned to the readily available CPC text ads (either Google's AdSence or Baidu's Content Ads)... but after years of complaints from advertisers about the quality of the ad network publishers, or issues around the click behavior Search Engines are having to respond by refining their partner programs. So does this mean the death of smaller, more niche publishers? Maybe, maybe not.... largely, it will depend on their ability to find alternative revenues and I suggest this could be the start of an affiliate marketing Renaissance in China.
I have been a vocal champion of a new affiliate marketing era in China. Not the old ad network model simply offering a CPS ad banner to random publishers that simply want to fill all their ad units but for a new ad network that will establish programs that target/recuit publishers based on criteria for achieving specific actions/outcomes. I am not advocating dropping in a Commission Junction or Trade Doubler platform and we now have a new affiliate marketing industry- these don't fit this local Chinese market but if you could take some of the ideas from these systems (transparency, reporting etc) and localize them with Chinese Affiliate Managers then I am quite excited about the possibilities of developing a new approach in cost per sales/lead models.
So, just as the first batch of Baidu's publishers are cut, I expect this scope of the adjustment may be further expanded. In the words of Cai Hu, general manager of Baidu Alliance, "this policy adjustment does not target a specific industry, as the websites Baidu stopped cooperation with are not high-valued sites, and the only sector affected is its profit-sharing cooperation". Given this will no doubt be causing a great deal of concern with smaller publishers relying on CPC revenues, I expect much more inquiry into the new generation of Chinese Affiliate platforms such as the U2Mee Affiliate platform*.
* The U2Mee Affiliate Network is a division within SinoTech Group
Written on Friday, 05 March 2010 08:51 by Matt McDougall