VietNamNet Bridge – People once believed that Google and Facebook would gulp down Vietnamese enterprises in the online marketing market. However, the giants have met their matches.

VNG’s General Director Le Hong Minh once expressed his worry on Zing Me, a Vietnamese social network that 50-60 percent of online ad revenue in Vietnam, worth 50-100 million dollars, would fall into the pockets of the two giants Google and Facebook in five years. And the other hundreds of Vietnamese Internet service providers and newspapers would have to struggle to death to obtain the remaining 40 percent.



Minh has every reason when predicting a bad prospect for Vietnamese enterprises.

In terms of the market coverage, Google has been holding absolute advantage in both display and search ads, while domestic enterprises have advantage in display ads only.

According to AC Nielsen and TNS, the market survey firms, Google now holds 95 percent of the online searching market and brings 70 percent of the total access traffic to the websites in Vietnam. This means that Google is now holding a big market share in Vietnam.

At a meeting with South East Asian partners last year, a senior executive of Google said the giant hoped the Vietnamese market would bring 30 million dollars a year.

In terms of revenue from search ads, Google now has more than 5.5 billion ad impressions per day, more than 192 million clicks per day (0.53 dollars, or 11,000 dong per click).

As for display ads, it has 25.6 billion impressions a day with the CTR (clickthrough rate) at 0.18 percent, more than 45.8 million clicks per day and the average price is 0.35 dollars (7000 dong) per click.

Meanwhile, Vietnamese Admarket can earn 2000 dong per click at the highest, not including VAT.

According to Nguyen Dang Ngoc, Admicro Director of VC Corp, the price levels set by Google are higher than that of Vietnamese enterprises. However, Google offers more flexible way of calculating fee, thus giving more choices to clients.

Especially, Google has its great advantages in technology (cloud computing). Meanwhile, Ngoc said, the majority of Vietnamese enterprises do not have technological basis.

In Vietnam, Google has been doing business through its big partners, while the profits have been shared between them. However, marketing experts believe that if Google increases its presence in Vietnam, it would be a big threat to Vietnamese online service providers.

While Google is dominating in the search ad market, Facebook is controlling the social network market segment. Just after eight years of operation, Facebook had had one billion users, which means that one out of every seven Internet users in the world is a member of Facebook.

Vietnam has been found as the country which has the highest growth rate in the number of users in Asia. Nearly 40 percent of Vietnamese people use Facebook to make trade, which is really the big opportunity for the social network to expand its business in Vietnam.

However, Vietnamese experts have noted that Minh has been overly worried about the future of Vietnamese enterprises. Google and Facebook are the giants, but this does not mean that there is no more room for Vietnamese enterprises in the market.

The experts have pointed out that if considering the number of users, the most visited websites are the ones run by Vietnamese enterprises, such as dantri.com, vnexpress.net, zing.vn, ngoisao.net, nhaccuatui.vn…

A survey by Kantar Media has found out that 90 percent of the most visited websites in Vietnam are Vietnamese, while the remaining belong to Google and Youtube.

DNSG