China online advertising hits $3bn

I still find myself doing a double-take when the People's Daily Online provides me with good insights. But, it quite often does. And here it goes again with a report on iResearch Inc's latest statistics which suggest that online advertising in China topped Rmb3.13 billion (US$388 million) in 2005. The report suggests that this represents a 77% increase on 2004 figures.

Backing up my theory that print media will never reach critical mass in the B2B sector in China, I note the following sentence in the article: "The business surpasses magazine ads (1.8 billion yuan and is close to radio broadcast ads (3.4 billion yuan)".

I would also note the following section:

It is worth noticing that market proportion of traditional portals led by Sina and Sohu was on decline while research engines by Baidu and Google was on the rise obviously.

Real estate, IT products and online services were ranked the top three sources of clients. Samsung spent the most on online ads, totaling 60.35 million yuan, which was followed by China Mobile and NetEase, 41.1 and 39.13 million yuan respectively.