Youku Tudou Merger, Chinese Netizen Reactions

On Sina Weibo:

@优酷网: Youku and Tudou announce merger, joining together to become the leading company in China’s online video industry. The Youku Tudou Limited Company established on a huge user base, diverse content, and powerful platform will lead China’s next generation online video revolution. After the merger, the new company will have even more impressive scale and powerful revenue conversion capabilities to achieve long term growth.

The above microblog post by Youku’s official Sina Weibo account was amongst the day’s most forwarded, having been shared over 55k times with over 13k comments within 12 hours of posting. Other postings by Sina Technology and Mop about the news are also amongst Weibo’s top trending posts for the day with tens of thousands of reshares and thousands of comments each.

The surprise announcement yesterday came after months of public fighting between the two Chinese online video streaming giants with accusations of illegal copyrighted content and unfair business practices.

Comments on Sina Weibo:

茶叶1852336157：

Why isn’t there an anti-monopoly law? This way, it will be the netizens who suffer!!!

苍南_染指寂：

Youku’s boss bedded Tudou’s boss’s wife, let’s merge.

柔安安安avaa：

China wants to use Youtudou to face off against Youtube?

南宫昀：

So you two really did get married. Alright, I once again believe in love.

取名字也太难了吧：

Television stations now have headaches. Originally they could sell to two websites and get money twice but now they’ve fucking merged.

Guitar丨灬A大调：

Youku and Tudou, this pair of jiyou aren’t fighting anymore, so what are we waiting for?

虎迷王：

The next to merge will be McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

8.逐笑黑白：

What a success! My two favorite websites… after they’re fused together, it’ll become a Chinese Super Saiyan named Youtudo to fight the American Voldemort Youtube. Sounds good, I don’t what the specific changes will be… [but] with the video world’s biggest and second biggest getting married, how are the other video websites going to survive?!!

吴娅姿：

I believe in love now! When will Colonel Sanders and Ronald McDonald become a family?

志乐着：

Suddenly remembered that my thesis is about the online video industry’s web portal advertising, and now that they’ve suddenly merged, all my data is of them separately, fuck…

映海凌云：

I prefer Tudou being independent. Hope Tudou won’t, because of the merger, become political. I like independent Tudou.

龙春洋：

This is good news! It’s annoying when there are too many video websites!

牧得儿：

Has no one noticed that when the two were going at each other, what you couldn’t find on Youku could be found on Tudou. Them two getting together…not surprising…

眼泪化成冰：

No matter how much they merge, Youku Tudou still can’t compete with YouTube, because the latter is global, while the former is a shanzhai version + the removal of the essence of freedom.

林林说：

A lot of the copyrights for films have been bought up by these two, and now that they’ve merged… it’s the beginning of a new monopoly… If we look at it positively, this helps the development of original/genuine work. Negatively it means new and smaller video websites won’t have any room to grow, that the prospects are dim for some entrepreneurs and workers in this industry, and the bad ones will close down and have to find new jobs.

发自内心的笑容：

Can you change the name? Youku Tudou? What kind of name is that? What are you guys doing, this news is too shocking.

hikari112：

All of this tells us that there are no permanent enemies in this world, that enemies can all of a sudden become your partner.

What do you think? Is this merger good or bad for the Chinese internet?