Richard Ji - Morgan Stanley
I mean, can you elaborate for us and what kind of -- what percentage of revenue or what portion of the advertising revenue come from this service so far and what are your current plans to further capitalize these popular new inventories?
Charles Chao
Well, I think the rich media and that include rich media and video and advertising inventory has been one of the most important factor for our inventory growth in the last year I think. And so at this point I think the total advertising revenue from rich media and video advertising accounts for almost 10% of the total advertising revenues. So I think this trend is going to continue next year.
I think really, I mean, if you look at this year, this is really a very important starting point for video advertising in China for 2009, and the video advertising, I''m talking about the inserted video advertising within the video content itself, I mean, actually has seen very, very strong growth sequentially this year.
I mean, in the second quarter, we saw that number more than doubled from the first quarter and in the third quarter we saw that number more than doubled again compared to the second quarter.
So this is really growing very, very fast and so I think next year we''re going to see more and more advertising from video inventories and this is particularly true when we try to attract more and more FMCG kind of advertisers into the new media platform. Video actually plays a very important role for attracting those advertisers and their budgets.
So we''ll all be very focused on building -- continue to build our video platform and increase our product and content offering in this sector so we can increase our sellable inventory in this area. And for the communities and abroad and I think this has been very important in the growth area for us also, difficult for us to break down the advertising revenues from the, whether it''s from the blog site of an individual blogger or from the blog channel. And if you combine these two actually this already becomes probably the third largest contributor of our ad inventories, I mean, among order -- content channels we have on SINA.
So blog has been a very important contributor for our advertising growth also and next year, we''re going to see probably more advertising from these community products. And so that is another reason we have been very focused on building our product in interactive communities so we have more competitive offerings in a market to attract more advertisers.
Operator
And your next question comes from Kathy Chen with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed.
Kathy Chen - Goldman Sachs
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I have two questions. The first one is a follow up on the advertising revenue guidance. It looks like the guidance on the price that you expect real estate advertising revenue to increase about 32% quarter-on-quarter, which is faster than the non real estate advertising side. Can you give some color on where this growth is coming from and whether you’re seeing some revenue synergies from the CRIC transaction and do you think you are taking market share in this segment?
The second question is on the cost side. Can you give us some guidance on the margin outlook for fourth quarter and next year after the CRIC spin-off? Should we expect any step up in marketing spend, content cost or bandwidth cost? Thanks.
Charles Chao
Okay. I will try to take the first question and Herman will take the second. Regarding the revenue, the projection for the fourth quarter, it’s true we had project a higher sequential growth for the real estate business and part of it''s a reflection of the market and part of it reflects our competitiveness in this sector given our cooperation with CRIC.
And I think historically, if you look at the fourth quarter it''s always a very strong quarter for our real estate business. So I think there is some seasonality here and but higher than normal growth rate sequentially is probably a reflection of the synergies, synergies created by the two companies.
And since the CRIC, our real estate business is already becoming a part of CRIC, I mean, in the fourth quarter, so probably not appropriate for me to comment too much detail on this business. You probably will have to listen to their conference call tonight on Beijing time. They''re going to have earnings release tonight Beijing time, so you probably can listen to more details on that conference to get more insight of that business. Now, I''m going to turn to Herman for the second question.
Herman Yu
Yeah. Hi, Kathy. This is Herman. So in my call script I talked about what would be at the operating income level excluding the SINA real estate impact for the first three quarter this year. I think for Q3 -- Q4, you would expect Q4 to have a higher cost than Q3. You can see the quarter-over-quarter trend in the last couple of quarters and Q4 will continue to have an increase in cost.
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