ABOUT TUDOU

Tudou.com (Chinese: 土豆网) is the largest video sharing platform in China, where users can upload, view and share video clips. Tudou went live on April 15, 2005 and has grown into one of the world's largest content delivery networks, serving over 100 million videos each day with more than 40,000 new videos published daily, including amateur content such as videoblogging and user-generated videos, and professional content such as movie clips, TV clips and music videos from our content providers.

Tudou has established extensive business relationships with well-known content providers, content brokers and traditional media. For example, the "Best of Tudou" is being broadcast on several of China’s national satellite TV channels.

During the summer of 2007, Nielsen/NetRatings reported that Tudou was one of the world's fastest growing websites, growing from 131 to 360 million clips viewed per week in just three months (press release available here). According to a July 16, 2007 iResearch survey, Tudou has more than 50% of the Chinese online video market, as of mid-2007, according to the Chinese tracking service iResearch.

Tudou was founded by our CEO Gary Wang with co-founder Marc van der Chijs. The name Tudou is Chinese pinyin (romanized Chinese) for Potato. Tudou’s goal is to move couch potatoes from the TV screen to computer screens, a process very much under way in China. Tudou has raised several rounds of funding, the latest being $57 million in early 2008 for a total of $85 million over four rounds of funding. Investors include IDG China, Granite Global Ventures, JAFCO, General Catalyst Partners and Capital Today.

Like many other on-line video sites, Tudou currently relies on advertisements for revenue, and we introduced our video ad system in 2007, where we show full screen pre-roll ads while the actual video loads as well as full screen wallpaper ads around the video during playback. Current advertisers using the platform include Adidas, Ford, KFC, Lenovo, Motorola, Nike, Pepsi, Samsung, and Sony, with more joining daily. We are also sharing advertising revenue with both individual and commercial producers.

Our ad platform allows advertisers to manage expenditures and target various demographic groups Note that the company was previously known as Toodou, so you may see some articles in 2005-2006 using that name - we changed our domain name to Tudou.com in August 2006 when that name became available.