Youku Tudou, often viewed as a Chinese version of YouTube, just announced that it is now reaching over 500 million monthly unique visitors.
For comparison, YouTube says more than 1 billion unique visitors visit its site each month — but keep in mind that Youku Tudou caters largely to a much smaller net of Chinese-speaking audiences only.
Youku Tudou’s latest milestone comes despite the immense competition from its rivals including Baidu-owned online video platform iQiyi.
It also comes as mobile is gaining more importance for the company — in its first quarter earnings, Youku Tudou revealed that its mobile daily video views passed 400 million. For the second quarter, company president and board director, Dele Liu, said that over 30 percent of the company’s revenue is being generated from mobile, and there has been “solid progress” in its subscription services with 379 percent growth year on year.
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Youku Tudou is China’s largest online video site with more than 450 million users, formed after a billion dollar merger in 2012.
Victor Koo, the chairman and CEO of Youku Tudou, said that going forward it will work with online and offline partners to “change how content is created and monetized” — we can only wait and see what this consists of. Alibaba’s $1.2 billion investment in the video site has already seen initiatives such as placing ads from its Taobao and Tmall merchants within online videos.
Headline image via Spencer Platt / Getty Images
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