CCTV exposes the story behind Baidu (Reposted)

Today, CCTV continued to criticize Baidu in its Channel 2 program. It has been four consecutive days now, but the content of the program is becoming more and more unpalatable. From CCTV’s exposure of counterfeit goods on Taobao and false information on Sina Weibo this year, to its action against Baidu, one cannot help but be suspicious of the motives behind this purposeful and strategic reporting.
The aftermath of Google’s withdrawal from China
Most of the problems that CCTV accused Baidu of do exist, but the problems in China's search market cannot be solved by organizing one or two activities or exposing one or two negative issues. These are institutional problems. When Google's search engine was so easy to use, why did CCTV fabricate the "Gao Ye incident" and the "Son incident" to drive Google away without reason and artificially create Baidu's current monopoly? This is the inevitable result of Google's withdrawal from China. The key to solving the problem still lies in the system. CCTV should stop interfering and let Google and Baidu compete freely and fully. The invisible hand of the market will automatically solve these problems. Internet users will choose the search engine with the best experience, and those products with poor search experience will be eliminated by the market.
In its program, CCTV completely denied the keyword advertising business model of search engines. The "experts" it interviewed either suggested passing laws to ban paid rankings or requiring Internet service providers to review all published information. In their eyes, these private Internet companies are themselves non-profit organizations. They must provide high-quality and accurate search services to netizens free of charge and cannot have any commercial profits. Maybe these "experts" believe this is feasible, but I don't believe it.
Keyword advertising business model

Baidu's promotional links and Google's keyword advertising (AdWords) are both successful business models. Traditionally, it is quite troublesome for companies to publish and place advertisements, because it is difficult to let the end consumers who need these products see the relevant advertisements. When advertising is published through media such as television, newspapers, and magazines, it faces all users, the communication effect is fleeting, the information has poor storage, and it is inconvenient to record and difficult to query. At the same time, the advertising cost is very high.
However, with the advent of the Internet age, search engines have become a common tool, and keyword advertising has become a very common and effective way of online promotion.
The basic model of keyword advertising is: when a user uses a certain keyword to search in a search engine, a text advertising link related to the keyword will appear on the search results page, displayed as "advertisement" or "promotional link" to distinguish it from natural search results. When users click on the ad link and enter the advertiser's website, the advertiser pays for it.
Keyword bidding advertising also brings a steady stream of revenue to search engines, solving the problem of search engine business models. This allows search engine companies to earn enough revenue to provide users with fast and high-quality search services. Compared with traditional online advertising, keyword advertising has many unique advantages, such as: 1) strong advertising targeting, relevant ads will only appear when users actively search for a certain keyword; 2) pay-per-click, you will pay only when the ad is clicked, and you will not pay if it is not clicked; 3) the price is relatively low, the pay-per-click (CPC) price is quite low (except for some popular keywords), which greatly reduces the cost of online advertising.
Of course, there are still many problems in the development of keyword advertising, including malicious clicks that increase advertising costs, invalid clicks, low click-through rates, etc., which all need to be slowly resolved in the development process. However, if CCTV completely denies the business model of search engines just because of a few problems with keyword advertising, then CCTV’s role in the development of China’s Internet economy will not be a promotion, but an obstacle.
Reprinted from: http://www.williamlong.info/archives/2778.html