From The Guardian:
Tudou – China’s answer to YouTube – was started in January 2005 (a month before YouTube) by 35-year-old Gary Wang. Nearly four years later, Tudou has some 12 million users a day and 75 million unique users a month. It serves 100m videos a day, numbers that make it the biggest video-sharing site in China. As for growth, Tudou has nearly three times more user visits today than a year ago.
“[The] internet in China is very much viewed as an alternative to TV entertainment,” says Wang. “People come to the internet looking for fun, not just for information.” In fact, one of the reasons he called the site Tudou is because it is the Chinese word for potato – a play on the English term “couch potato”.
Wang is personable and speaks fluent English, a legacy of having studied and worked in the US and Europe before returning to his native China earlier this decade. Back in China, Wang worked for almost three years for Bertelsmann Group trying to open various business doors, particularly around investments in TV channels. He realised there were too many regulations to work an entertainment miracle on the traditional medium, but recognised the potential of the internet.
