The Chinese online advertising market reached 2.8 billion RMB ($411 million U.S. dollars) in the second quarter of 2008, Analyst International (AI) reported. Online brand advertising jumped 65.3% to 4.86 billion RMB in 2007 and is expected to reach 23.7 billion RMB by 2011, said the report. Brand-focused advertising accounted for 71.3 percent of the $405 million market last year, with search ad spending accounting for the remainder.

China now has 253 million internet users (17.4% of the world's total) who spend 570 million hours online per day. United States has the second largest number of internet users, 223 million. However, the United States reported more than $22.5 billion in online advertising last year, about 15 times more than that of China. In the United States $594 per capita was spent on online advertising in 2007, compared to only $11 in China. Clearly, the potential for growth is tremendous.

According to Deutsche Bank, online advertising in China will grow by 50% to $1.79 billion in 2008. Smaller players are expanding at least 10 percentage points faster than the larger portals, increasing the average ad revenue growth rate.

China Internet Media Group (CIMG) capitalizes on the growth of those smaller players, whose combined advertising power exceeds that of any single web portal. CIMG has developed a unique technology allowing it to simultaneously serve advertising messages to thousands of web sites. The advertising messages could be in a variety of formats – widgets, banners, podcasts, RSS feeds, mobile content, mash-ups. CIMG affiliates are divided in categories which allows for better targeted campaigns. CIMG's distributed advertising network maximizes the impression surface area of an advertising campaign thus providing greater granularity and focus. As a result, advertising campaigns run by CIMG reach a greater number of people and are more cost efficient than the conventional forms of Internet advertising.