Chinese video website Tudou.com announced at the product conference of its high-definition channel hd.tudou.com that the company made CNY11.296 million in the advertising sector in the first half of 2008 — much more than that of its competitor Youku.com but still an overall paltry amount in China's advertising sector.

According to the statistics quoted by Tudou.com in a report from Techweb.com.cn, from January to June 2008, its advertising revenue reached CNY11.296 million while Youku.com, a major competitor of Tudou.com in the video website sector, made only CNY5.48 million over the same period. These statistics are from a report on advertisements placed on the Chinese Internet by Zed Digital. These numbers are actually quite small when placed next to a typical company's total advertising spend for television in China where one company's television campaign might spend much more than CNY10 million in a short period of time. As another comparison of Internet advertising inflow, Internet advertising revenues for the second quarter of 2008 totaled more than CNY430 million for Chinese Internet portal Sina.com — nearly forty times larger than Tudou.com's revenue in half the time.

Incidentally, according to a one-week monitoring report offered by Tudou.com on advertisers who place advertisements on three major video websites, the number of non-repetitive advertisers of Tudou.com is 98 and that of Youku.com and Ku6.com are 42 and 39, respectively.

Wang Wei, CEO of Tudou.com, said that as the financing of video websites will be nearly impossible in the next two years, the marketing strength will decide the fate of video websites in the future. Wang predicts that Tudou.com's revenue will have at least doubled in 2009 and, on a conservative estimate, the company will gain profits within three years.