Youku Launches Copyright Identification Management Platform
Pioneering Move in China to Promote Respect for Intellectual Property
BEIJING, Jan. 20 — Youku, China’s leading Internet video site, today announced the launch of its copyright identification management platform, the first of its kind in China. As Youku increases the scale of content acquisition and cooperation with its content [...]

CNNIC (the China Internet Network Information Center - don’t bother trying to figure out how that acronym’s supposed to fit) just released its 25th semi-annual survey report. You’ve probably already seen that the new number for total Internet users is 384 million, up from 338 million at mid-year 2009, and up from 298 million at [...]

One of our favorite websites, ChinaHush.com, carried these translations from Chinnews.net and from the very popular forum Tianya condemning the forthcoming dismissal of nearly half a million substitute teachers. The dismissal of substitutes became a much-talked-about issue in 2008 (see this story), and has apparently been in the works since 2001, when a plan was [...]

The comments section on Youku videos are a terrific place to get a glimpse into the psyche of China’s netizens — what they’re thinking about, what their values are, and what really pisses them off. Check out this list of Youku’s Top 10 Controversies for 2009. Some very amusing stuff here!
Isn’t There a Two-Bottle Limit?: [...]

Here’s our list of the Top Ten Hottest Topics on Youku.com for the year. Please note that links are to the playlist for the Top 10, and not to the originally uploaded videos, so if the play counts look low, that’s why. After we’re all back from holiday, we’ll be putting up quite a number [...]

You may recall that just before Christmas, on the evening of the 20th, Youku broadcast a major concert event nationally. The “China Mobile Migu Music Concert” was massively star-studded: It was a veritable who’s who of A-list recording artists, including Asia’s biggest pop sensation, Jay Chou; singer Li Yuchun, who catapulted to fame after winning [...]

It’s only fitting that the Youku user who uploaded this little pastiche of Christmas decorations around Beijing should have been shot exclusively in shopping centers around Beijing — Shin Kong Place, Wangfujing and so forth. It’s become almost entirely banal to note the extent of commercialization of Christmas in China — not that I really [...]

At midnight last night we released the announcement that Youku.com has closed a first tranche of an expansion round for $40 million. We timed the funding announcement to coincide with the third anniversary of our nationwide launch back in December 2006. We also got some good coverage from The Wall Street Journal here.
We’ve now passed [...]

We loved this video, which appears to have been shot at Adventure World, Shirahama, Wakayama prefecture in Japan. There’s a video on Youtube featuring the same twin baby pandas - not like I can tell one panda from another - in what appears to be the same enclosure. Not sure it’s the same video. In [...]

On December 10, an 11-year-old boy named He Chuhua hanged himself in the Guangdong city of Dongguan, China’s massive manufacturing capital.
The poignant part? He hanged himself with his red Young Pioneers neckerchief — his honglingjing, tying it to the steel frame of his bunk-bed in his rented room. Xiao Hua, as he was known, had [...]