SINA Aims Higher

These are busy times for Stock Advisor recommendation SINA (Nasdaq: SINA). The Chinese media giant is teaming up with China's Qunar to launch a travel-based blogging site, just as it gears up to arm its most active bloggers with ad revenue-sharing deals.

SINA is already a cyberspace star, drawing 100 million unique monthly users. Hooking up with travel search leader Qunar to see if Web 2.0 can fly in a travel-themed wrapper is a win-win deal. If it's as sticky as stateside Web 2.0 sites like Expedia's (Nasdaq: EXPE) Trip Advisor or Yahoo!'s (Nasdaq: YHOO) recently remodeled Trip Planner, keeping citizens of the thriving Chinese economy close as they travel will be huge. Next year's Olympic Games in Beijing will bring even more exposure to the world's most populous nation.

SINA is also taking a page from Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) playbook, arming its most popular bloggers with a piece of the action. Just as Google opened up its AdSense program to blog publishers at Blogger.com a couple of years ago, SINA is striking ad revenue deals with its user base.

Marketwatch's Paul Waide writes that bloggers accepted into SINA's program next month will generate roughly $2.66 per 10,000 page views. That differs from the AdSense program, which typically pays per generated lead, even though it does offer some impression-based ads. The sum may seem like a pittance relative to what top AdSense bloggers are generating domestically, but it's still generous, considering China's lower levels of disposable income and the eventual upside.

Critics argue that this may eat into Baidu.com's (Nasdaq: BIDU) superiority as China's paid-search leader. That's ridiculous. Baidu has had a similar program for years; it's called Baidu Union, and it offers third-party publishers a chunk of the ad revenue in exchange for rebroadcasting its paid-search ads.

Commanding nearly two-thirds of the search engine queries in China, Baidu's Rolodex of interactive marketing clients seeking out local leads is now 128,000 advertisers thick. That kind of spirited competition for attention typically drives prices higher, making Baidu the top choice of webmasters with dreams of automated monetization.

This isn't all that different from what we're seeing domestically. Yahoo! may have launched the first paid search network, but Google democratized the process with the 2003 introduction of AdSense. Yahoo! has been trying to eat into Google's superiority with its Yahoo! Publisher Network, but it's been an uphill battle to win over publishers that are satisfied with Google's high-paying product.

So it's OK to cheer for SINA here. Revenue sharing is good. Web 2.0 travel is great. But if you're Baidu, this isn't much of a nail-biting moment.       

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