Baike.com

About Baike.com

Baike.com, formerly known as Hudong, is a for-profit, social network and Chinese-language online encyclopedia. It was founded on June 19, 2005, by Dr. Pan Haidong. Pan holds a bachelor's degree from Beijing University of Science and Technology, a master's from Tsinghua University, and a Ph.D. in systems engineering from Boston University, a background that provided a foundation for his venture into wiki-based platforms. Prior to Baike.com, Pan had co-founded a management consulting firm and served as CIO for an office supply website. Inspired by the collaborative wiki concept, Pan established the company to create a comprehensive Chinese knowledge-sharing platform.

The company's primary product is the wiki-based encyclopedia, baike.com, which operates as a collaborative platform where users can create, edit, and contribute content, positioning itself as a major competitor to Baidu Baike. By early 2019, the platform had amassed 18 million articles and 25 million images, created by over 13 million users. In addition to its main encyclopedia site, Baike.com developed its own open-source wiki software, HDWiki, which has been utilized by over 1,000 other websites. The business model primarily relies on revenue from advertising and technical services. Baike.com has also supplied encyclopedia content to several technology companies for use in their products, including smart speakers from Huawei and Alibaba, and educational devices from Xiaomi.

The company has experienced several significant financial and structural milestones. In 2011, Baike.com secured a $15 million investment from the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. It was publicly listed on the Chinese NEEQ (National Equities Exchange and Quotations) in February 2016 but delisted in January 2019. In a strategic move to bolster its own search engine capabilities, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok and Douyin, fully acquired Baike.com in September 2019 after initially taking a 22.22% stake. This acquisition integrated Baike.com's extensive content library into ByteDance's ecosystem, particularly to support its Toutiao Search, directly challenging Baidu's dominance in the Chinese search market.