Internet has becoming an increasingly popular information channel for audience watching the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, said a report from CSM Media Research.

Ninety percent of respondents would choose to see the Games on TV, and 30 percent would like to follow the Games through Internet, exceeding the amount choosing print media, according to a survey, conducted by CSM in China's 10 key cities, covering audience aged from 15 to 40.

To attract viewers and advertisers during the Games, Chinese major Internet portals have spent an unprecedented amount of money in getting contents and marketing themselves, the China Business News reported.

Yesterday, Sina.com, Netease.com and Tencent signed an agreement with CCTV.com to use the latter's multimedia contents during the Games, including its opening and closing ceremonies. Sohu.com got the rights from CCTV.com last month.

CCTV.com, the only official Beijing Olympic Games mobile phone and Internet broadcast platform on the mainland and Macao, may broadcast 3,800 hours of the Olympic Games.

"No one has had this experience before," said Liu Lu, CCTV.com Olympic copyright protection center chief.

"With the extensive use of broadband and online streaming technology, online video has become one of the most popular Internet applications in China," said Sina Corp’s chief executive officer Charles Chao.

In addition to getting online videos, the portal sites have spent much more efforts in buying equipments, contacting athletes and cooperation with print media for covering the 2008 Olympics.

Sohu.com may have paid about 500 million yuan ($73.33 million) in the Olympics-related activities, the paper reported, citing an unnamed official in charge of sports channel at a portal site.

In 2005, Sohu.com became the Internet Content Services Sponsor of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, reportedly paying $20 million for rights to host the Olympics' official website – www.beijing2008.com and use its logo.

Sina.com and Tencent's expenses may have amounted to 130 million yuan and 100 million yuan respectively, the paper said.

The battle among these portal sites got intensified in 2005, after Sohu.com claimed exclusive rights to host all sponsors' advertisements using the Olympic logo. In response, competitors, including Sina.com, Netease and Tencent, formed an alliance against Sohu.

Up to now, the major portals have almost completed clinching contracts with advertisers during the Games, the paper reported, forecasting that those advertisement contracts will bring in a considerable part of their income in the second and third quarter.

However, Charles Zhang, president and CEO of Sohu.com, said he did not think a lot of advertisement revenue during the Games. "What I care most is to build Sohu.com the No. 1 Internet portal in China through sponsoring the Olympics."

But without releasing any details of its advertisement revenue, Zhang confirmed that the company has registered some profits from Olympics advertising, which has already recovered costs in winning the approval as the official sponsor of the Games,

As the Internet Content Services Sponsor, Sohu.com will set up a 700-member editorial team to cover the action at all Olympic venues. More than 100 people of the team have gotten passes, only after CCTV and Xinhua News Agency by number.

China has surpassed the United States as home to the world's largest national population of Internet users and with the Games fast approaching.

Chinese internet users spend about 570 million hours online per day, making the country a huge potential market for e-commerce, according to a report released in Beijing last week by the Boston Consulting Group.

The consulting firm said the market scale of the digital service and equipment market in China stood at 580 billion yuan in 2007. It was expected to triple to 1.8 trillion yuan in 2015. Eight years from now, online advertising was expected to surge eight times to reach 85 billion yuan.

(Chinadaily.com.cn July?17, 2008?)