Eric Schmidt of Google discussing China with Charlie Rose
Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, was recently on Charlie Rose talking about the China censorship issue. As you recall, Google threatened to pull out of the Mainland China market insinuating Chinese government backed hacking (no evidence to date) and threatening non-compliance with Chinese censorship laws. When China didn’t budge, Google shut down the search service on google.cn. Instead, on google.cn, there is a fake search box, and when a user clicks, it redirects the user to the Hong Kong google.com.hk site. According to this AP article, since then, Google dropped in revenue search share in China from 30.9% to 24.2% with bulk of the loss added to Baidu’s gain. Remember, this is revenue share, and given Google’s reach for the generally more English language capable Chinese population and Google’s over-all better monitization, Google’s user share within China is likely in the low teens or single digit percentage wise (my opinion).
We have written about the PR stunt Google pulled earlier in the year. (See Allen’s debunk: “Google vs. China – Good vs. Evil?“) It has been almost a year, and it is interesting to see Google’s current positioning on the issue. For your reference, below is a snippet of the Charlie Rose program transcript.
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