Jack Ma is called as Internet strategist in China. He created world's largest online business community and defeated Ebay completely in China Market. Both Alibaba and Taobao generate great influence to the general public of China.
Alimama represents a niche market comparing to the mentioned two. The move shows the maturization of China's internet market. The era of market segmentation is coming!

Now

it isn't freeŁĄ

Just a joke!

Good point - free how? Does this mean free advertising in terms of a directory of SMEs?

Alimama is an ad exchange; a place where you can trade ads. I haven't used the service, but there was a recent article that went into their offerings in more detail: Interview with Alimama.com, one of the most popular online ads trading sites [ecommerce-journal.com]

There are two ways to purchase ad space via Alimama. First, the direct or customer-to-customer (C2C) model, where advertisers design online ad campaigns and select ad space by themselves and make a transaction with a website publisher directly; Second, there is the business-to-customer (B2C) model, where Alimama puts together online ad inventory with a targeted audience, and then sells that to advertisers as a package. In this model, Alimama salespeople negotiate with potential advertisers and their agents.

I don't see any mentions of the word 'free' anywhere in the article though. It does say this:

We charge a 10% commission on CPS ad "Tao Ke Tui Guang", and charge a 15% commission on CPC and CPM ads; there is no commission for CPT ads. However, we are considering not charging any commission for all ads through the C2C ads trading platform. Alimama will only charge for ads sold via the B2C platform.

Thanks Bill.

I may have mentioned in previous posts that we have commissioned a site in China. Trading ads with others sites would give us the opportunity to launch our new site with a lower cash outlay that I expected. In the medium term we could switch to CPC.

Thanks again.