More than 600 Chinese search marketing firms have accused the big search engines in that country—Google, Baidu and Yahoo!—of jeopardizing their businesses by trying to deal directly with their marketer clients.
The 637 agencies said in a statement Friday that they will file a lawsuit against at least one large search company for breach of a contract that they say guarantees their role as intermediaries, according to the Xinghua news agency.
According to the agencies involved, 60% of their profits come from search engine operators, and only 10% of their revenue is net profit, after costs of promotion, marketing and operation.
The initiative to sue one of the search engines is being spearheaded by Chinese reference site Booksir.com. Booksir deputy director Fu Dekun was quoted in the press report as saying that “Ninety-five percent of [Chinese SEM] agencies are in the red.”
At press time, Google, Baidu and Yahoo! had not responded to the complaint.
Xinghua reported that there are about 120,000 small and mid-sized search marketing agencies in China’s online search market. A recent report by IReseach found that Baidu, in which Google owns a minority share, has about 56.6% of the search traffic in China; Google itself has 32.8%.
