文 | Tiana
On the evening of May 16, Baidu announced its 24Q1 financial report: total revenue of 31.5 billion yuan in the first quarter. Net profit attributable to Baidu (Non-GAAP) was 7.011 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22%, and net profit attributable to Baidu's core (Non-GAAP) was 6.628 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 26%.
Online marketing revenue is stable
Robin Li, co-founder and CEO of Baidu, said, "Baidu's core online marketing revenue remained stable, and the end-to-end optimization of our AI technology stack continued to drive AI cloud revenue growth during the quarter. ”
According to the latest financial report, in the first quarter of 2024, Baidu achieved 17 billion yuan in online marketing revenue, an increase of 3 percentage points from the same period last year. At the same time, non-network marketing revenue also reached 6.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6%, which was mainly driven by the company's artificial intelligence cloud business.
In March of the same year, the number of monthly active users of Baidu's app reached 676 million, with a year-on-year growth rate of 3%. It's worth noting that the revenue from hosted pages in the quarter already accounted for half of Baidu's core online marketing revenue.
"Online marketing revenue in the first quarter increased by 3% year-on-year, and at present, about 11% of search results are estimated using generative AI technology, but we have not yet commercially monetized this part of the generative AI results, so the corresponding growth of related revenue will take some time." He also mentioned that the macroeconomic downturn has had an impact on the advertising business, especially in specific industries such as real estate and franchising.
At the earnings call, Robin Li also said that the company is shifting from Internet-centric to artificial intelligence-first, and promoting the reconstruction of To C and To B businesses with Wenxin large models.
AI search marketing
Still in the groping phase
Robin Li judged: "Search is most likely to become a "killer" application in the AI era".
At present, the Wenxin model can process about 250 billion tokens text per day and 200 million calls per day, but the AI reconstruction of Baidu search is still in its early stages.
Ben Gomes, Google's head of search, once said, "Search is the closest place to money."
A few days ago, Google launched a new version of its search engine, which includes search results written by artificial intelligence. Google said it will roll out the new search engine with AI Overviews to users in the U.S. this week and to more countries in the coming months, reaching more than 1 billion users by the end of the year, and claims it will also be one of the biggest updates to its search engine in 25 years.
Google's focus on providing users with accurate answers directly to users may make their search behavior more efficient and precise, but this may also lead to a corresponding reduction in the opportunities for Google to display ads.
Therefore, with the full rollout of AI, the display form of advertising will also undergo changes.
In response, Google announced that while advancing these changes, they will focus on ensuring that the traffic of websites, content creators, and merchants is guaranteed. Still, Google has not elaborated on what specific steps it will take to implement this commitment.
Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2026, search volumes will decrease by 25% on traditional search engines, and AI solutions are gradually replacing answer engines with user queries that may have previously been performed in traditional search engines, forcing companies to rethink their marketing channel strategies.
Looking ahead to the next few quarters, Robin Li predicts that the advertising business may still face growth challenges. However, the sequential growth in advertising revenue related to AI technology in the first quarter is expected to continue this positive trend and provide assistance in easing macroeconomic pressures.