An organization of more than 600 Chinese search marketing agencies accused the major search engines in China of taking their customers away. The current contracts with search engines treat the agencies as intermediaires and changing the relationship could spell doom for the nearly 120,000 search marketing agencies in China. The search engines have not responded to the accusations.
Source: Peoples Daily
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David Temple
Latest posts by David Temple (see all)
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This is a new market without established patterns of appropriate business behaviour. But search engines in general seem to be going in the direction of “we know best for our clients and users†despite protestations to the contrary by the very senior search engine management eg at SES New York.
This is certainly the first time that ‘near-monopolies’ have been created so fast – and regulation of all of this is bound to follow – especially in Europe, for instance, where there is very comprehensive competition legislation which one of the older monopoles – namely Microsoft – has fallen foul of.
However – “caveat emptor†as we say in the UK (!) or “buyer-bewareâ€. If you’re going to spend 000s on a paid-search campaign – get an agency…. otherwise how will you know when you’re being taken for a ride…? How will you compare providers….? How will you navigate through the increasing complexity……?