The Next Web

My favorite soap opera: the Chinese online video market

Written on July 1, 2008 – 1:26 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

On days like today it seems no industry is more exciting than the Chinese online video market. It’s like a soap opera with all the right ingredients: a government that isn’t afraid to pull the censorship card every once in a while, tough competition, as much rumors as videos, and millions, millions of funding. So here’s your latest episode with, I must say, quite a cliff hanger.

The millions of funding

Firstly, there’s Youku. Nobody’s exactly sure, but they seem to be the no. 2 video site (100 million daily video views). They’ve already gathered $40 million of funding in three rounds and announced yesterday that this number has doubled. The video site received $30 million from existing investors Brookside Capital Partners, Sutter Hill Ventures, Farallon Capital and Chengwei Ventures and added another $10 million with a loan by Western Technology Investment (former loans: Facebook and Google).

But that’s not all, as one of the other video players in world’s largest internet market also managed to get a few millions here and there. The Pacific Epoch reports that the smaller video site Ku6.com has received $30 million in series C funding. An employee secretly told them, as Ku6 isn’t very transparent when it comes to funding. They allegedly closed series B at the end of last year and received $10 million of series A funding in May 2007.

The destination of this money is almost certain, as Tudou (no.1) founder Marc van der Chijs told me that almost all the investments flow directly to bandwidth. He said that he could turn Tudou into a profitable business by limiting the bandwidth usage, yet then his competition would probably catch-up.

The censorship

In that very same conversation, Van der Chijs also mentioned that almost every censorship rumor isn’t true and just matches the way we, people from the west, like to see China. But here’s one thing that’s undeniable: 56.com (no. 3) has been off line for almost a month now. VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon wrote an excellent piece about this matter, and refers to several Chinese sources who claim 56.com has been taken off line by the government, particularly because they didn’t like 56.com footage of the earthquake in May. “We may never know the real reason why 56.com has been shut down”, Eldon wrote, “But if the cause is censorship, this is a tragedy for anyone who believes in the democratic system.”

There’s your cliff hanger people. Stay tuned to your blog to hear the latest on this soap opera where two forces clash on almost a daily basis: the money versus the government.

I hope you like that post!

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56.com, censorship, china, funding, marc van der chijs, online video, tudou, youku

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Tudou pumps recently raised $57M in bandwidth

Written on May 12, 2008 – 3:38 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Last Tuesday co-editor Boris and Johan Schaap organized a dinner for Marc van der Chijs, a Dutch entrepreneur who co-founded China’s largest video site Tudou and the Asia division of online gaming company Spill Group. In Holland and beyond, he’s well-known as a true pioneer who represents the almost endless possibilities in China.

Marc van der Chijs, Boris, Johan Schaap & Yuri van Geest

During dinner I had an interesting conversation with him about Tudou, entrepreneurship and enormous bandwidth usage. Van der Chijs came to China because of his job with Daimler-Chrysler brought him there. Yet after a while, Van der Chijs felt the urge to do something on his own and quit his job. “I went from a car with a chauffeur to a bicycle”, he told me. “I signed up for a six-month Chinese language program and started building my first company”. Eventually he co-founded Tudou, and this is where it gets really interesting.

Tudou is one big success story as it’s world’s largest video sharing website. According to Mary Meekers latest data in Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends Report, Tudou (35 billion minutes in January) is 40 percent bigger than YouTube (25 billion minutes). An average visitor, Van der Chijs told me, stays on the site for 47 minutes: “For the young Chinese people, it is a substitute for television”. Competition is tough though, as other major video sites like Youku and 56.com also manage to attract millions of visitors every day.

As you might know, they’ve recently raised 57 million dollars. When I asked Van der Chijs what Tudou will do with this money, he replied: “Spend it on bandwidth”. No other site has a bandwidth bill which is as high as Tudou’s. He said that he could turn Tudou into a profitable business by limiting the bandwidth usage, yet then his competition would probably catch-up. So Tudou uses the recently raised money to invest in servers and its infrastructure. “We’re talking about thousands of machines here”, said Van der Chijs. Moreover, Tudou isn’t doing a bad job with selling advertisements - preloaders and banners - and preventing unnecessary money spending - “I fly economy”.

So take this from a man who knows what he’s talking about: to stay ahead of the competition, video sites like Tudou should invest in bandwidth. And one day, one day it will most definitely pay off.

bandwith, china, funding, interview, investment, marc van der chijs, tudou, Video Interview

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