Baidu's defining moves.
The defining strategic moves at Baidu — each one explained and grounded in the record.
The Counterfactual · Decision Forks
Baidu Still Owns China's Search. It Lost the Thing Search Was Worth.
Baidu held ~52-60% of China's search through 2024 and 703 million mobile users. So why is the lead gone? Because the queries that pay - local services, commerce, lifestyle - migrated inside apps Baidu can't index, and its core ad revenue fell to RMB73bn.
8 min
The Counterfactual · Decision Forks
Baidu Didn't Miss Mobile. Mobile Stopped Being a Web It Could Read.
The story is that Baidu slept through mobile. But its own filings show mobile revenue climbing from 37% to 63% of sales in two years. What it actually lost wasn't money — it was an indexable web, walled off into apps it could never crawl.
8 min
The Adjacency Expansion · Adjacency Expansion
Baidu Spent Fifteen Years Building New Engines. It's Still Running on the Old One.
Baidu pushed into video, robotaxis, AI cloud, and a homegrown rival to ChatGPT. Yet in 2024 online marketing still made up roughly three-quarters of its core revenue - and total revenue fell 1%. The adjacencies grew; the dependence didn't budge.
8 min