SHANGHAI, Aug. 25 -- CHINESE search engine Baidu.com is selling video advertisements on its partner Websites to diversify its revenue stream besides depending on search-related ads, which it already dominates in the Chinese market.

The country's No. 1 search engine is collecting orders from its customers interested in the new ad service and selecting sites for the placement, said a Baidu spokesman yesterday.

"It's like installing a TV screen on the wall, which in our case is the Web page, and our responsibility is to find the right page for advertisers to maximize the value on their spending," Xu Jiye, a spokesman for Beijing-based Baidu, said.

The program is named Baidu TV, designed to monetize its partner Websites' traffic. There are around 150,000 sites which have already formed a partnership with Baidu through cooperation on search-related ads.

These sites, called Baidu Union members, are mostly small ones with stable traffic and rich content ranging from vertical industry portals to entertainment sites, but it is difficult for them to attract advertisers on their own due to their size.

Under the partnership with Baidu, which has a 57-percent share in the Chinese search market, these sites have gained more than 5,000 Baidu customers and share revenue with the search engine portal.

Xu refused to say how many of these sites have been chosen to run the video-based ads or the average agreed proportion of revenue sharing.

The sales contribution of Baidu Union members to the company's total revenue has been rising this year as the search engine tries to consolidate its position through partnership with other sites, while rivals like Google are also aggressively growing their own search tie-ups.

Google, which ranks No. 2 in China's search market with a 21-percent share, has begun to sell ads on a limited number of videos on YouTube.com, which it acquired last year for US$1.65 billion, as it tries to capitalize on the surging popularity of online videos.

China's online ad market grew 43 percent in the first half from a year ago to nearly three billion yuan (US$385 million). Baidu is now No. 1 in ad revenue for the first time, surpassing Sina.com, the nation's most popular portal, said Beijing-based industry researcher Analysys Intentional.