Baidu Rolls out A Digital Content Trading Marketplace

Baidu rolled out a digital content trading marketplace, named Cloud Shopping Mall, where anyone can upload videos, music, images, slide shows or other formats of digital files, and sell them there.

Payments are supported by Baifubao, the online payments solution by Baidu, and several online banking services.

It’s built on top of Baidu Cloud that all content you buy would be automatically saved in Baidu’s servers. Baidu offers every user 2048G free storage and promises not to charge users forever.

It’s unknown whether or when Baidu would take revenue shares from transactions.

Chinese entrepreneurs always wanted to build online marketplaces for videos, music, e-books and so on. Online music streaming services like Xiami built marketplaces trying to sell albums for musicians; newly emerged online education platforms enable selling video courses or other formats of educational materials. Content creators or copyright holders, on the other hand, needs those marketplaces to reach audiences and generate some income.

But piracy is always a problem with such marketplaces. And users can always find pirated goods sold at much lower prices on other platforms. Look at Taobao where you can always find knockoff luxury goods, let alone markets for digital content which cost little to duplicate. You can find e-books on Taobao that are sold at one tenth or even one hundredth of the list prices — they must be pirated.

It must be a problem with the Baidu platform too. But it’s not sure whether Baidu has taken it into consideration at all. The largest search engine in China has been notorious for letting pirated song downloads available and convenient with its MP3 search service. Baidu doesn’t say whether they’d take any measures to filter out the pirated content. But it looks you can just upload any file in your devices there and put a price on it.