Chinese search engine Baidu has been one of the key leaders in the country’s transition to the mobile Internet. Over the past three years, traffic driven by mobile searches on Baidu has climbed 1000%.
The company released new statistics in its quarterly Mobile Internet Development report on Wednesday. As of December 2012, traffic from mobile searches on Baidu was 11 times the amount from January 2010. Baidu revealed during a recent earnings call that it had achieved 80 million daily active users across its various mobile search products.
Chinese websites have been gradually adding mobile-specific editions of their sites as users have taken to signing on from their smartphones and tablets. Roughly 80% of the websites visited from Baidu’s mobile search were optimized for mobile devices, according to the company. The upgrade to HTML 5 is still a ways out, though, as Baidu estimates that just 5% of large and medium websites operate mobile sites that make use of the standard.
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Reading searches were the most popular topic for mobile Baidu users, representing 16% of the total. Shopping (9.5%), utilities (8.2%) and location-based services (7.3%) were also top searches. Searches for apps also represented a decent share (4.2%) of the pie, with the top two categories being utilities and games.
Baidu’s report found that 9:30pm-10pm is the most popular time for mobile Internet use. Though reading materials remain the top search throughout, mobile video searches spike in the evenings.
Baidu is investing heavily to ramp up its mobile monetization efforts as it works to close the gap between mobile and PC search. The company posted revenues of over $1 billion last quarter, with $448.7 million in net income.
Image Credit: LIU JIN/AFP/Getty Images
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