Couch Potatoes No More
Speaker Series: Gary Wang, Founder & CEO, Tudou
Evening Reception, 18:30-20:30, Wednesday 16 November 2011, The Hughes Room, First Floor, Foreign Correspondents’ Club
How Tudou (“potato” in Mandarin) is beating YouTube, Hulu and HBO in China at their own games, and is transforming television, media regulation and consumer behavior in China along the way.
Event Details:
The Stanford GSB Chapter of Hong Kong welcomed Gary Wang, Founder & CEO of Tudou. Gary shared his thoughts on how Tudou has been able to successfully create its operating space in China’s media landscape, where Tudou and the China media/advertising sector go from here, Tudou’s transformation impact on China overall and his own career path from aerospace (with Hughes Aircraft) to media/internet.
Founded in 2005, in less than 6 years, Tudou has grown to China’s leading on-line video website, receiving more than 200 million unique visitors per month, hosting more than 40 million videos and streaming roughly 15 billion minutes of content, daily, vs 3 billion daily for YouTube, and with over 50% of the Chinese on-line video market. Tudou was listed in August 2011 on the NASDAQ. However Tudou (meaning “Potato”, a word play on the goal of moving couch potatoes from the television screen to the computer screen), is much more than a China-version of YouTube (and, indeed, went live several months before YouTube first did).
With its slogan, “Today’s TV Network, Tomorrow’s Tudou”, the company also creates original productions and aggregates on-line production from other established content providers, being as much a Hulu and an HBO as a YouTube, with only half of its traffic coming from user-generated content, the remaining coming from premium content sources from Taiwan, China, Korea, Japanese and the USA, including television, film and music video. Tudou’s first drama series, The Love That Comes, launched in October 2010, received 34 million viewings in its first two weeks and has been sold to more than a dozen overseas distributors, revolutionizing on-line advertising models along the way.
The path that Tudou has forged has not been easy. The heavily regulated media sector in China means that the company was only finally licensed in 2008 – three years after beginning operations. As such Tudou operates at the key intersection of new media potential, old media regulation and changing consumer behavior in China.
Speaker’s Bio: Gary Wang
Gary Wang is Founder, CEO and General Director of Tudou, China’s leading video-content website.
Gary’s start in new media was anything but traditional. He began his career with Hughes Aircraft in the United States after graduating with a Master’s degree in Computing from Johns Hopkins University, subsequently moving to Beijing for the Group. After receiving his MBA from INSEAD, Gary shifted to media, working initially in the strategy department of Bertelsmann AG, prior to being named CEO of BOL China, the European media giant’s then on-line book retailer. Tudou was subsequently established by Gary in April 2005.