Baidu vows to further help Chinese developers expand overseas

 

Hu Yong, general manager of Baidu's global business unit, delivers a keynote speech at the company's "DU Ad Platform (DAP) Forum" held on July 14, 2016 in Shenzhen. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Chinese Internet giant Baidu Inc opened "DU Ad Platform (DAP) Forum" on Thursday, aiming to support domestic mobile Internet developers to make profits overseas.

Named as "Making the Breakthrough", this is the second time that a forum of its kind is being held after debuting in Beijing, following the announcement of the company's "DU+ Plan", a strategy to increase ad monetization for mobile developers.

The "DU+ Plan" promises developers 100 percent of the revenues from mobile advertising campaigns that they carry out on DAP.

Although there are existing platforms that provide consulting and mobile ad promoting services for developers, such as Google's AdMob, Cheetah Mobile, Facebook and Twitter, Hu Yong, general manager of Baidu's global business unit, told China Daily that there won't be any competitors for the company as it is positioned as a developer itself, bridging and integrating with the other service providers to fulfill the demands of Chinese developers.

"Through DAP, we are keen on helping developers grow their business, and bolstering the growth of mobile ecosystems in emerging markets worldwide," said Hu.

Li Xiaodong, Baidu global business unit's head of monetization and business development, said that Chinese mobile app developers and publishers have started to take the global stage, quoting the statistics from App Annie, saying that among the top 100 apps that are being downloaded 470 million times per month on Google Play, apart from the most welcomed apps that exclusively are produced by Facebook or Google, 38 percent or 120 million downloaded volume come from China-made applications.

Hu Yong, general manager of Baidu's global business unit, delivers a keynote speech at the company's "DU Ad Platform (DAP) Forum" held on July 14, 2016 in Shenzhen. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

"The smartphone device market in China is reaching a plateau. It's time to change our perspective and start looking globally," said Li. "Emerging markets with low smartphone penetration still hold a lot of opportunity for developers to create new niches.”

Wei Fangdan, CEO of baijingapp.com, an online community that covers more than 40,000 Chinese developers, said Chinese mobile app developers started eyeing overseas market since 2012 and most of the early products are "tools apps" that focus on cache cleaning, anti-virus, data transferring and management, mobile desktop and screen locker.

He said that due to competition becoming white hot and rapid rise in cost in domestic market for app developers to attract users, an overseas market that protects copyright and consumption custom for paid apps have lured the attention and provided more opportunities for the developers.

"Apps that provide contents and services, such as social media apps, live streaming apps, maps, mobile payments apps and online shopping apps have become the new trends for Chinese developers targeted in emerging markets such as India and Southeast Asia counties," said Wei.

Baidu first unveiled DAP last year at the Baidu World conference in Beijing.

In April, Baidu launched DAP for advertisers and publishers in India.

According to the company, DAP currently serves more than 300 million monthly active users from over 230 countries.

As more than 600 developers accessing it, DAP receives 1.5 billion daily requests for ads, with the peak request rate being 100,000 requests per second.