THREE top Chinese Websites have formed an alliance to report on the 2008 Beijing Olympics in a competitive battle against the single official site.
The deal will involve sharing advertising resources to enhance the Websites' bargaining power among other measures to jointly exploit the marketing opportunities created by the giant event.
Yesterday's announcement came as a declaration of war against the event's official Internet sponsor, Sohu.com.
"We will integrate our resources and provide new technology-based reporting platforms for the event," said the statement, endorsed by Sina.com, Tencent Inc and NetEase.com.
An official at Sina, China's largest portal, said the three companies are still working out the details of their cooperation.
"There's no rule that requires advertisers to place ads only on the official Olympic partner's Website," he said.
The three Websites will share their partner newspapers and television stations for on-the-spot reporting of Olympic events.
Tencent, operator of the nation's most popular instant message service, said it will launch a new version of QQ, whose user base accounts for two-thirds of China's Web population. The new service will go online next year to facilitate access to information about the Olympics. New features will include instant news on sports events in an updated QQ program's chat box.
"They are not a threat. Together they have more users but not more Olympic report content, while we have the access," said Chen Luming, vice president of Sohu.com, China's third-largest portal, and the executive in charge of the company's Olympic division.
Sohu operates the official Website for the Beijing Olympics organizing committee and is the only Chinese online media company to have exclusive access to premier Olympic content.
The Website announced in March an exclusive collaborative agreement with the nation's top 15 newspapers in setting up a media alliance for the Beijing games.