Insights | How to choose the youtube alternative in China?

Talking about video hosting sites, Youtube is the solo mass-market player without question in spite of the challenge from Vimeo. However, the video landscape in China shows a different picture. 

​Youku/Tudou, Tencent Video and IQiyi split the market and compete fiercely on the audience and revenue in the past few years.
 
In 2012, Youku, at that time the biggest video site, merged with Tudou, kept its traditional advantage on self-made videos and has grown steadily ever since. But they didn’t expect the fast growth and direct competition from IQiyi.
 
The video content online shifted from self-made videos, to purchased TV series, and now towards self-made shows. The revenue model changes accordingly. In the old days, those ideo sites only benefit from the traffic and ads income. When the video sites invested in exlcusive TV series competing with traditional TV stations, membership subscription starts picking up. Audience also becomes more comfortable with the ideas of paying for high-quality content and skipping the long compulsory ads. IQiyi, focusing on purchasing top TV shows and broadcast rights at the beginning and now growing its territory in self-made show, announced that its members are over 20 million in 2016, i.e. the revenue from membership subscription is equivalent as the one from paid advertisement. 

Another wave of change came this year. The derivative products from the shows or TV series see a strong growth. Audience tends to extend the discussion of the show to the reality. Mobile games, aligned with TV series characters and story background, and collaterals with the show’s elements, which can vary from food to cosmetics, are the most common and well-received ones. 
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Bilibili stays outside of the battle of the Big Three and continues growing among the young generation.  Tan Mu, its key feature, allows the comments fly across the screen while people watch the videos. It motivates people to comment more and laugh over others’ comments. The high engagement from Tan Mu feature brings in a new revenue source for Bilibili other than VIP members and traffic for ads. KFC’s successful live broadcasting campaign on Bilibili pointed out a new direction for the integrated campaign - The copy is customized for the audience, two platform hosts in Japanese maid costume are invited to live broadcast them eating 50 pieces of fried chicken. For 15min session, the video received 190,000 views and over 3000.

Therefore, if a brand wants to enter the video site, Seeniun Media’s suggestion is as below:

• If you want to find an alternative for Vimeo and embed the videos to the corporate website, none of the mainstream websites’ API can be ads-free and high-resolution as Vimeo. It is better to use free players such as JCPlayer and store videos on the cloud.
• If you want to find an alternative for Youtube and embed videos to social media accounts, Wechat account only accepts the videos uploaded to Tencent Video and Weibo is more open to Youku, Tencent and others
• If you want to launch a video ads or campaigns, Youku and Bilibili can be a good option, however, the video ads in China is far more expensive than Youtube Ads. Only the brand with decent budget and plan to run a massive campaign will choose to run ads on these video platforms. 

Seeniun Media, a full advertising agency with focus on China, will help you produce video that suits Chinese audience, as well as launch video ad campaign in China. Contact us now!