Youku Tudou, a leading online video operator in China, has revealed several milestones around its video services. At the end of March, Youku Tudou reached 100m daily unique visitors (UV) including 20m monthly UV on Mobile. This means 20% of its Traffic is from 3G enabled Mobile Networks. Daily video clips viewed hit 150m, implying some 50% growth from 2012 year-end. Youku Tudou’s main competitor, Baidu’s iQiyi . The average daily time spent on mobile video apps reached 31 minutes in 2012 compared with only 9 minutes in 2011.
Mobile Video Apps in China
Most of of China’s mobile video views come from apps, industry players are applying ever greater effort toward apps development in order to build their user base. With regard to the iOS platform, data from AppData, a leading iOS app tracking agency, show that the Sohu Video app currently ranks 1st amongst all free iPad entertainment apps in China. Youku’s app ranks second.
For the Android platform, the iQiyi app enjoyed the largest number of downloads among all mobile video apps. Meanwhile, Youku increased cumulative downloads from about 3m in 2Q12 to more than 15m in 4Q12, surpassing PPTV and PPS to rank second. The rise of Youku in mobile video apps market is likely due to a combination of some of the industry’s most up-to-date contents, user-friendly interface, convenient cross-platform watching, as well as the power of Youku’s brand.
Advertising on Mobile Videos
Several players such as iQiyi and other have already introduced pre-roll video ads to mobile devices, which are largely identical to those found on PC’s. We believe these ads are often limited to Wifi environments in order to save traffic costs for users.
Another monetization approach is paid services. Sohu Video and China Unicom introduced a data plan for mobile Sohu Video users to watch an unlimited amount of videos for a fixed monthly charge.