Global marketing news – 23 February 2016
Wikipedia to create its own search engine Wikimedia Discovery
The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has announced that it is going to build its own search engine.
It intends to spend 2.5 million US dollars on building the search engine, named Wikimedia Discovery, and aspires to compete against the likes of Google.
Wikimedia Discovery wants to be the world’s “first transparent search engine” and has pledged to protect user privacy, include no advertising, and give open data access to meta data.
At first, Wikimedia Discovery will just contain information drawn from Wikipedia, but the company hopes that it will eventually also contain information from other open sources of information.
A spokesperson from the company commented on announcement, saying that they wanted Wikimedia Discovery to be one of the most “reliable and trustworthy” ways to find information online.
It is unclear when the search engine will be launched.
Ad blocking company Shine signs deals with 3
The ad blocking company Shine has signed deals with the mobile networks Three UK and Three Italy.
Shine’s technology will allow the mobile networks to implement ad blocking on their entire networks, although it is currently unknown exactly when Three will roll out ad blocking.
Shine predominately targets display ads, i.e. pop ups and banners that disrupt the user’s mobile browsing experience. It does not affect native advertising as these are deemed less intrusive.
Three has explained why it has entered into a partnership with Shine, hitting out at mobile ads by saying: “Irrelevant and excessive mobile ads annoy customers and affect their overall network experience. We do not believe customers should have to pay for data usage driven by mobile ads.”
There are signs that this could be just the first step of Shine’s expansion across the world, with the company saying that it is in talks with around 60 other mobile networks around the globe, including in the US and Europe.
1/3 of Russian e-commerce was from Chinese sites in 2015
One third of online purchases made in Russia last year were from Chinese e-commerce platforms.
In monetary terms this translates to a staggering 2 billion US dollars being spent by Russians on Chinese online stores, with Russia’s main online payments service, Yandex.Money, seeing a massive 38-fold increase in transactions compared to the previous year.
The reason for this sudden surge in Russians buying from Chinese sites seems to be the falling value of the rouble.
Chinese e-commerce sites often have cheaper prices than their Russian and European counterparts, making them an appealing option for Russian consumers.
Chinese sites have also been making improvements in the way they deal with Russian customers, with improved logistics meaning that Russian customers get speedy deliveries.
The majority of Russians shopping on Chinese sites are from small villages and cities, and the most popular products bought are clothes, shoes and mobile phones. The top visited Chinese sites were JD and AliExpress.
Video-on-demand search engine launched in South Africa
And finally, a search engine that allows users to search video-on-demand services has launched in South Africa.
JustWatch collates the TV programmes and films offered by the country’s largest streaming providers, allowing users to see which programmes are being shown on which platforms, all in one place.
Users can search for specific programmes or filter by genre, streaming provider, price, rating or release date.
JustWatch South Africa currently indexes shows from Netflix, iTunes, Mubi, ShowMax and DSTV’s BoxOffice.
JustWatch’s CEO explained why they chose to expand into the South African market, saying: “South Africa’s infrastructure and online penetration has been growing so fast in the last years that streaming is working now better and better.”
Around 1 million South Africans currently have broadband speeds fast enough to stream online TV, out of a population of over 50 million.
As fibre optic internet becomes more commonplace in the country, however, this proportion is expected to grow dramatically.
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