Alimama mia! It's still free

I've been in Greece all week attending exhibition industry meetings with UFI. Once again, I've been a lazy blogger.

Catching up with e-mails and news feeds, I notice that Alibaba continues to be a disciple of Chris "Long Tail" Anderson's credo that "Free is the future of business". Alimama was always one of their dafter product names, but now we learn from Reuters that it, like most of Ali-launches, it's free.

Once again, building market share is the goal. Reuters quotes Wu Yongming, Alimama's General Manager saying, "The goal for Alimama.com set by [Jack Ma] is to acquire the largest share of online advertising in China within 3-5 years". The piece goes on to say that "After a 10-month trial run, Alimama.com has about 400,000 registered websites and records 2.8 billion daily page views".