Baidu Tests Its Own Group-Buying Site to Go Beyond Aggregating Daily Deals
Baidu, which is China’s top search engine and the No. 4 search engine in the world, according to NetMarketShare, is moving beyond aggregating daily deals and is testing a new group-buying service. If the new site (t.baidu.com) sees a full rollout, it would make Baidu a direct seller of promotions, putting it in competition with the very daily-deals companies whose deals it currently aggregates.
A group-buying site from Baidu would have plenty of competition in China, where the top 10 sites in the industry accounted for 90 percent of the market’s revenue last year.
At the end of 2012, 55tuan, a Groupon clone in China, announced that it was the first daily-deals site in the country to turn a profit at a large scale. When this declaration was made, there were about 2,000 daily-deals sites left standing in China, down from about 6,000 as recently as May.
In the U.S., Groupon isn’t leaving much room for optimism about the long-term viability of the daily-deals model.
