Baidu is anxious to make quick money.
Editor’s note: This article from the public micro-channel number ” Tech planet “(ID: tech618) , author: red.
When will Baidu return to the market highs? This is a matter of great concern to the entire Internet circle.
In the past few years, the Internet circle has witnessed the decline of Baidu’s market value. Today, Baidu, which has a 20-year history, has a market value lower than that of a 9-year-old Zoom with little profit.
Maybe it’s indignant. Some media ridicule that if Baidu’s market value is used as a unit of measurement, then Alibaba and Tencent are about 18 degrees, Meituan is about 2.8 degrees, and Pinduoduo is about 2.5 degrees.
Behind the joking joke, it is the true portrayal of Baidu’s landslide. After missing the waves of O2O and mobile Internet, Baidu is now at a critical intersection for drastic reforms.
In the first half of this year, Baidu’s new actions are constantly on the way, such as live broadcast, resurrection of local life, and the opening of Apollp Robotaxi self-driving taxi service, all of which are revealing to the market that Baidu is trying to get back on track. Li Yanhong is also leading Baidu’s transformation from connecting “people” and “information” to connecting “people” and “service”. Baidu is also looking forward to forming a closed loop of “expressing demand-discovering information-completing services”.
Baidu’s transformation is not only for launching innovative products, but more importantly, diversified services mean that the user’s usage time increases, and this also brings Baidu more possibilities for monetization.
Of course, this is just a move for Baidu to return to the high ground of value. More importantly, Baidu is now facing a huge talent gap, such as filling the gap and retaining talent, maybe Baidu needs to think deeply.
Baidu is stepping back to the center of the stage, its approach is to release new products and services step by step.
In February of this year, Baidu’s internal office tool “Baidu Hi” was officially opened to the public. On April 27, Baidu Hi was officially renamed “Ruliu” to maintain the existing While the functions remain unchanged, office services such as audio and video conferencing and automatic translation of up to 520 people have been added. It seems that it has to compete with Dingding, Tencent Conference, Feishu and Huawei Welink.
However, these have hardly caused any splash, which is far less than the heat brought by Li Yanhong’s live broadcast.
On May 15, Li Yanhong opened the first live broadcast in his life. Baidu officially found Fan Deng, the founder of Fan Deng Reading, and chatted about the “home-book” theme for more than an hour. This live broadcast of more than one hour had 9.26 million viewers watching online, which also made Baidu’s market value skyrocket by $1.7 billion overnight.
Li Yanhong’s personal appearance is enough to show that Baidu attaches great importance to the live broadcast business. In fact, the live broadcast also embodies one of the development directions of Baidu’s mobile ecosystem in the second half of this year: “people” and “services”.
In the past, Baidu has been connecting people and information, but this connection is extremely fragile. After Baidu searches for information, it can be transferred to other platforms, which results in extremely limited time for users to stay in Baidu.
So, connecting people and services has become an important starting point for Baidu this year. More than just live broadcasting, Baidu recently resurrected its “local life” business. The Baidu service center covers nine fixed entrances such as medical health and courier services, covering the three sections of convenient life, eating and drinking, and travel. At present, users need to enter “Baidu Live” and “Service Center” in the Baidu App search box to enter related channels.