China’s largest search engine Baidu revealed on Friday that the number of daily active users (DAUs) of its Baidu App has surpassed 200 million, driven by Baidu’s content feed Baijiahao and mini programs inside the app.
Baijiahao, a content platform launched by Baidu in 2016, has already attracted 2 million original publishers by now, with its original content increasing by 135% compared with last year. On the other hand, Baidu’s mini program platform, which was launched just a year ago, has now more than 150,000 programs and over 270 million monthly active users, covering 271 industry segments.
The announcement comes just days after China’s most valuable startup ByteDance, developer of short video apps Douyin and TikTok, unveiled a search portal designed for mobile devices.
Although ByteDance said it had no plans to launch a standalone search app for the time being, Baidu has taken many efforts to fence against other rivals market intrusion.
The search engine giant said that it’s looking forward to increasing and enhancing the capabilities and services of its Baidu App, via investments in other companies including a subsidiary of Chinese e-commerce Software as a Service vendor Youzan, and Q&A platform Zhihu.
Baidu’s current strategic partnership with Zhihu allows its users to access all the Q&A platform’s content and interact with authors via the Zhihu’s mini program on Baidu app, according to Baidu.
The search engine, together with short video app Kuaishou, just led USD 434 million series F funding round for Zhihu, KrASIA reported on Monday.
Baidu also agreed to pour about USD 30 million cash into Qima, a non-wholly owned subsidiary of Youzan, to cooperate on mini program development, KrASIA reported earlier this month.
The Chinese search engine’s market capitalization declined to USD 33.2 billion on Wednesday, lagging behind other Chinese giants such as NetEase, Meituan, JD.com, Alibaba, and Tencent.
ByteDance, which is now valued at USD 75 billion, is reportedly planning an IPO as early as this year.