VietNamNet Bridge – The competition between Vietnamese and foreign enterprises on the online ad market has been described as the fight of David against Goliath. In order to survive, Vietnamese need to apply their own tactical principle.

Experts agree that Vietnamese enterprises have their own advantages. In HCM City, though Google is the most visited website (28 percent), followed by Facebook (5.1 percent). However, most of the viewers remain the readers of Vietnamese websites.

In principle, the income comes from two sources, either from the fee collection from users or the ads from enterprises. Meanwhile, Vietnamese Internet firms have the income mainly coming from ads. This means that the websites with the high numbers of visitors would have the advantages in the revenue. This is the second big advantage of Vietnamese enterprises.

According to TNS Media, vnexpress.net is now leading the market, earning 31.1 percent of the total ad turnover in 2011. The second position belongs to 24h.com.vn (25.1 percent), the surface areas reserved for ad pieces on the two websites always account for 20-30 percent of the surface areas. The ad fees set by the two websites have always been by far higher than that set by other newspapers.

As for the ads charged per click, in the past, the starting price level applied to all websites was 1500 dong per click, not including VAT. The current prices are between 1100 dong and 2000 dong per click.

Marketing experts have pointed out that with the current profit sharing at 40/60, the decrease of the fee from 1500 dong per click to 1100 dong per click would lead to the sharp fall of 26 percent of enterprises’ revenue.

Who to bet on?

It’s clear that Vietnamese enterprises now get the better of foreign in terms of the number of service providers, but they are inferior to foreign ones in terms of the market, revenue and ad forms.

Minh, when analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of the rivals, noted that good content has always been a big advantage of domestic enterprises. However, the problem is that they would not be able to grow up if they purely rely on content services, especially in Vietnam, where people do not think they have to pay for content.

Vnexpress.net is still being highly appreciated in terms of the number of visitors. However, analysts say they should find out another way to follow in the new stage of development. Its model of charging fees on the real time of displaying is now considered out of date.

In order to improve their business performance, FPT Online, which owns vnexpress.net, has just launched a website at www.eclick.vn. eClick, like other ad networks in Vietnam, tries to attract publishers to join the system and post ad pieces. The prices for advertisers and the income for publishers would be decided on the numbers of clicks.

At present, eClick charges 1500 dong per click, an average level if compared with Admarket, Ad360 and Adnet. It hopes to obtain 1.25 billion pageviews by the end of 2012.

VCCorp, one of the big guys on the ad market, which holds 30-40 percent of the market share with more than 150 websites, has launched an ad network on mobile devices (Mobile Ad network), after realizing the increasing popularity of mobile phones.

Especially, the corporation has joined hands with Google and become the partner of the big guy since October 2012 in its plan to develop the ads on searching engines.

DNSG