Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Jason Brueschke from Citigroup. Please proceed.
Jason Brueschke - Citigroup
Thank you. Good morning, Charles and Herman. Can I begin by talking about some of the monetization opportunities you have around your Web 2.0 properties? I know that earlier in the third quarter, you had announced some preliminary efforts to do monetization of the blogs and you have a lot of, as you said in the prepared remarks, a lot of very interesting and I think probably compelling different ways of attracting traffic.
But as we look into 2008, can you just give us a sense of when the monetization of these products will become material and how we should think about maybe the ramp-up in the monetization of these new services? And then I have a follow-up question as well.
Charles Chao
On the monetization for the web 2.0 product, I think I’ll just make a correction here. We actually never officially announced any initiative for the web 2.0 monetization on the press. I think there’s some local media report on some initiatives on our experiment for the revenue sharing program on our blog platform. And indeed, we have started the experiment in the late part of Q3 and what we did was selecting about 20, 30 celebrity blogs and to place advertising on their personal blog and we are trying to adopt a revenue share program with these bloggers.
Basically, the results so far have been pretty encouraging and we have received some advertising results effectiveness in these blogs have been very similar to the results we have seen in some of our prime channels, in the front page of prime channels -- I mean, the page views and the click-through rates.
But in terms of our place for rolling out this particular blog sharing program, revenue program, we are still I think in the experimental stage and our plan is to roll out the entire platform in Q1 2008. At this stage, I mean, it is too early to tell the magnitude and the revenue contribution we may have on this particular product going forward and our hope obviously is to ramp up the scaleable revenues by the second half of next year. But at this stage, I think there are a lot of logistic problems we have to overcome and I think it is too early to tell.
- To read the full transcript on Seeking Alpha, click here »
