Baidu offers a big bait for Indian developers

(Baidu is going aggressive, at least when it comes to getting Indian developers to take its platform seriously)

Baidu might be the Internet giant in China, but in India, despite having a bunch of popular Android apps, the leading Chinese-language Internet search provider has some serious catching up to do. This could be why the company is going aggressive, at least when it comes to getting Indian developers to take its platform seriously.

The company is going to offer 100 per cent revenue for developers who sign up for the company’s DU Ad platform. Josh Fenn, Senior Marketing Manager of Baidu Inc’s Global Business Unit, says this DU Plus Plan will be a limited period offer, but it certainly highlights the intentions of this company.

Baidu, which has seen Internet grow in China, thinks it has a better understanding of what people in an emerging market like India will need. The company is going to push for a more localised approach in India promoted by the Baidu Mobo Market which is already available in Hindi, Bangla, Marathi, Tamil and Urdu with Telugu launching soon.

Baidu, which built major foundational elements of the Internet in China with its search engine and map platforms wants to build a similar type of digital infrastructure in India.

Though India is the latest market where Baidu has launched an office, it already has some interesting numbers for its apps here with the marketplace alone clocking 4.5 million monthly active users.

The company is also gung ho about big data and machine learning and hopes to plug in learnings from its Institute of Deep Learning into its ad network. “What we have done for the DU Ad platform is use data from 1.6 billion users and use that to offer highly targeted advertisements. This is completely plug and play for developers. Our peak selection algorithm will always ensure that our ads have the highest revenue,” Fenn says.