Baidu Acquires JOYY’s China Live-Streaming Business for $2.1 Billion

Posted by By Dan Taylor 2 Min Read

Baidu has completed its long-delayed purchase of JOYY’s China live-streaming unit, YY Live, for $2.1 billion. This move strengthens Baidu’s position in the digital video market and revives a deal that initially fell through last year.

A Deal Years in the Making

Baidu and JOYY originally agreed on a $3.6 billion acquisition in 2020. At the time, video-streaming platforms saw a surge in users due to the pandemic. However, regulatory challenges in China prevented the deal from closing, and it was officially abandoned in early 2024.

Now, with Beijing easing its stance on the tech industry, Baidu has successfully completed the purchase. JOYY had already received $1.86 billion in 2021 as part of the original agreement, and Baidu paid an additional $240 million to finalize the deal.

Strengthening Baidu’s Position

The acquisition helps Baidu expand its digital entertainment offerings and compete with major players like ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok and Douyin. It also gives Baidu a stronger foothold in the fast-growing live-streaming sector.

IQIYI, a Baidu subsidiary often compared to Netflix, has faced challenges from rivals such as Tencent Video and Alibaba’s Youku. The addition of YY Live could give Baidu an edge in the competitive market.

Boosting AI and Cloud Investments

Aside from expanding its digital content business, the acquisition also frees up $1.6 billion that Baidu had previously held in escrow for the 2020 deal. The company could now use these funds to invest in AI and cloud computing.

With AI development becoming increasingly competitive, Baidu may use the funds to enhance its infrastructure and stay ahead of emerging players like DeepSeek.

Following the announcement, Baidu’s U.S.-listed shares rose by 1% in premarket trading, while JOYY saw a 6% jump.

Dan Taylor
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Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.
Founder & Editor