A Day in the Life at Youku.com
Posted on Apr 9, 2009 by Kaiser Kuo | Filed under: About Youku
We thought we’d share with you some recent stats from Youku.com. The data below is from Saturday, April 4 — not any special day, and one which, if you buy traditional Chinese numerological superstition, should have been particularly inauspicious: it was “4-4,” after all. I freely confess that, as you expect, we tend to have better traffic on weekends. But surely you won’t hold it against us for showing you our better side!
On Saturday the 4th of April we had 146,803,100 video views (we call ‘em VVs), which was up by 4.15% from the previous Saturday. Total view time amounted to 1,253,850,000 minutes — no, you’re not reading that wrong, that’s really 1.25 billion minutes. Which is almost 21 million hours, or 870 thousand days, or 2,385 years. That, you’ll grant, is a lot of video to serve in one 24-hour period. Each video view lasted an average of 8.54 minutes, which is down by 2.45% from the same day last week. But the average time spent per unique user on site that day was a second or two shy of 50 minutes.
This past Saturday we had 25,091,500 unique visitors. That means, if you believe that there are about 300 million Internet users in China, that over 8% of all the nation’s Internet users visited Youku that day. Those visitors generated just over 200 million page views, up 4.31% from the week before. Each unique visitor generated about 7.98 page views, and about 5.85 video views.
8,245,800 searches were performed on Youku that day, up about 1.84% week-on-week, generating close to 40 million search result page views: that means that the average searcher flipped through just under five pages of results.
Youku users uploaded at total of 60,050 new videos to the site, which is down about 4% and about normal for any given day: Uploads fluctuate considerably from day to day.
Let us know if you have any questions! We’d love to have comparable statistics for Youtube and our other Internet video sites, but I haven’t seen them.
April 9th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
data talks,no doubt youku is the No.1 video site in china.
only a little advice,i find it very unconvenience using the search system in youku to locate one particular video which i want see.why not classify videos by keywords , tagcloud or sth else like the imdb does, at imdb i can find a particular movie which i dont know its name , the actor’s names , director’s name or even the company’s name but only by a keyword ‘dinosaur’ which i remembered appeared in that film. well , will that be a hard job since u got so many many videos to tag, ha , at least , there gotta be someone tilting at the windmills ,right ?
April 9th, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Yeah,I totally agree with what Techi said . The search system is very weak in all Chinese video sites.
April 9th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Hi Techi and Phil - We’re always working to improve search, but the quality of search is totally dependent on people tagging and titling things properly when they upload. As you can see from this post, we sometimes have 60 thousand or more videos uploaded a day, and there’s simply no way for us to go through and label them all correctly and uniformly, and adding all the tags that would help to make them easy to locate. At a site like IMDB, the hardcore fans who administer it agreed to certain conventions long ago, and have fields all filled out that are easily searchable. With video sites, there’s not a lot of text to grab onto first of all, and even when people do tag things it’s often done very inconsistently. Thanks for your feedback!
April 10th, 2009 at 5:06 am
Those are impressive numbers and all but a lot of the vids on youku still transmit very slowly. It can be such a pain in the backside. This is from someone living in the UK so I guess maybe the distance could be the problem. Any explanations on that?
April 10th, 2009 at 5:58 am
Gale,
I have the same problem here in the Bay Area (California, USA). Videos on Youku are unwatchable because playback stalls all the time. Not to knock Youku, but I do not see the same problem on Tudou.
I’m on a 768 Kbps AT&T DSL line, plenty bandwidth.
Is this a problem with the CDN not extended beyond China or something else?
April 10th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Gale, Lei, Youku definitely gives priority to viewers in China for the obvious reason that that’s where the overwhelming majority live. It pains me to know what a horrid experience it can be to try and watch Youku from anywhere outside of East Asia, but we have to do what makes sense as a business. So as you say, Lei, our CDN is limited to China and we don’t cache anywhere outside of the PRC. The user experience within China (mainly a function of playback speed, naturally) consistently rates at #1 in third-party consumer surveys. There’s really no sensible business case to be made for Youku to devote resources to overseas viewers, I’m afraid. I wish that something could be done. Gale, by all means, watch videos on whatever platform works best for you (I think there’s lots to like about Tudou, personally, and don’t mind saying so) so please don’t worry about offending us! Thanks so much for your comments!
Best,
Kaiser
April 10th, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Curious what the average length of an uploaded video is, and how many staff are employed to monitor them for illegal content?
April 10th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Hi Paul,
Sorry, can’t help you there with a precise number. I believe the average length of an uploaded video is probably in the 15-20 minute range, but don’t quote me, and I’m afraid the number of monitors isn’t something we can reveal.
Best,
Kaiser
April 10th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
one thing that helps is that the international competitor is often block
April 10th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
Hey Kaiser, thanks for the reply, appreciated. Interesting that the average length for an uploaded video is greater than the average viewing time for a single video. Do you think this is because videos are not viewed in whole, or that longer length videos are more long tail, shorter ones are more popular. [Plus, maybe a biggie, are you including embedded views in these stats?]
Thanks for being open with stats. You’re a PR pro, would love other platforms to reveal a snapshot of their data in a public space, can only lead to good discussion. Not in the field, but find pumping such huge amounts of data fascinating.
April 10th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
BTW, accessing Youku from Brea CA doesn’t lead to lag, but also doesn’t allow arbitary foward-winding without around 3 seconds cache-building, not great but far from horrible.
April 11th, 2009 at 4:48 am
Kaiser,
Does the 4.15% increase have anything to do with the fact that YouTube was blocked? Did Youku see a spike in traffic after YouTube went down?
-Julian
April 11th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Hi Julian,
Youtube actually accounts for very low levels of traffic in China, in part because even when it’s not blocked it’s a generally awful user experience. You can’t blame them for not having a server presence in China, after all. The last report that I looked at from a third party put it at a distant number 8, and so I don’t think that the blocking of Youtube accounts for any substantial change. Our traffic has increased fairly steadily with only a few dips since the site launched three years ago.
Paul, thanks very much, I also believe that transparency is only good. As far as your question, first off, I was only guessing more or less at average length of an uploaded video, and I don’t have anything more definitive in terms of why that length might be longer than average view time, even if that turns out to be true. I’ll ask our CTO and the folks who watch stats at the company and let you know!
Best,
Kaiser
April 12th, 2009 at 7:57 am
“You can’t blame them for not having a server presence in China, after all.”—KAISER KUO
Sir, I heard that they have a server in WuDaoKou in that Tsinghua Tech Center where Sohu and Google etc. are located. Is that false information. I also know quite a few locals who preferred YOUTUBE to YOUKU. All your guessing is speculative and the blockage has certainly helped your and YOUKU’S bottomline. It’s hard to take your word for it when you work for YOUKU. You have an interest in reporting bad news of the competitor—especially such a strong one.
April 12th, 2009 at 9:10 am
Hi Sgt. Slaughter -
I don’t know whether they have a server in Wudaokou, but as you can see there isn’t a mainland China choice on Youtube when you select your geography, and most people in China who want Youtube faster use Japan. I do know local Chinese who prefer Youtube to Youku, too; I certainly wouldn’t dispute that. For many categories of video, I’m definitely among those who prefer Youtube, too. After all, as someone whose mother tongue is English and who grew up in the United States, I’m always keen to watch what’s happening in user-generated video from my home country.
Honestly, though, I don’t think that the Youtube blockage has done much at all to traffic for any of the Chinese internet video sites — maybe a percentage point bump or so for the leaders, but as you say, it’s speculative and I don’t have the numbers in front of me. I suspect that people look to the two sites for very different reasons. People watch television serials (mainly HK, Taiwan, Korean, Japanese, and PRC, but also of course some from outside of Asia) on Youku, and they watch Chinese user-generated content. If they’re interested in Western UGC I presume they’d look at Youtube first.
I’m certainly not interested in reporting “bad news of the competitor.” In fact I’m really bummed that Youtube is blocked, because I’m a big fan and a heavy user. And the notion that this in some way helps me personally is simply wrong. I’m only a consultant here, and own not a single share or option in the company. I receive a monthly retainer that is in now way tied to traffic, ranking, or any other stats.
Even presuming that traffic is up for Youku due to a Youtube blockage, that would hurt Youku’s bottom line before it will help it: increased traffic means more (very expensive) bandwidth costs, after all. The best we can hope is that having enough of a market share lead would eventually mean more ad revenue as brands decide to buy media with us over our competitors. Youtube’s being blocked wouldn’t translate into increased traffic just for Youku, either: I suspect it would help all the Chinese Internet video sites.
I don’t think there’s any need to be so aggressive in accusing me of some sort of conflict of interest.
Best,
Kaiser
April 12th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
[...] April 4, 2009) have been lifted from Youku’s English language blog, YouKu Buzz. Link here to see the original post and a great conversation thread for more details. Thanks for being so [...]
April 12th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
“I don’t think there’s any need to be so aggressive in accusing me of some sort of conflict of interest.” KAISER KUO
I apologize if I came across as aggressive. That was not my intent. However, your explanation that more traffic would raise costs at YOUKU for bandwidth etc is valid but it would also mean ad prices could go up.
As a personal comment I liked the way the movie page on YOUKU used to be, when they recently changed it—perhaps I am just dumd—I find it hard to find what I need.
Again, I apologize if I pissed you off. I know you do quite a bit to contribute positively to many many ventures here in China and abroad and I don’t want to criticize that. I should choose my words more carefully perhaps.
Happy Easter Sir.
April 13th, 2009 at 7:14 am
Hi Sgt. Slaughter -
No offense taken! We’re cool. Thanks much for your feedback on the movie page: I’ll pass along that point.
In a perfect world any additional costs we incur in operating could be passed on as increased ad rates, but unfortunately there isn’t that level of demand elasticity.
Appreciate you writing back, and I welcome your input any time!
Best regards,
Kaiser
May 5th, 2009 at 5:45 am
sorry but i just use youku cuz my school suck an have restrict youtube
May 13th, 2009 at 8:38 am
Just a thought, how about not ’staggering’ videos so that it loads really fast for about 30 seconds, then stops, then continues again in spurts?
How about telling your non-Chinese visitors when the BEST times to view videos are? (Tell us your days/hours of least activity)
How about having an English ‘About Us’ page at the minimum? I should learn Chinese but it wouldn’t hurt for your public relations.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:46 am
I was wondering if there is anyway to change the language settings on Youku to english. I don’t understand what the website is saying and what I have to do. Thank you.
October 4th, 2009 at 2:56 am
that kaiser dude knows his stuff i have a question how do i translate youku to english also? it works fine for me if you leave it say 20 minutes to buffer it just plays straight through also some movies just buffer better than others i found for instance fullmetal jacket (brilliant film) please reply kaiser thankyou in advance PEACEEE