Renren.com Teams With Youku-Tudou To Grab More Online Video Users

Chinese Internet video company Youku-Tudou Group and Chinese social networking website Renren.com have formed a strategic partnership for platform and resource sharing.

According to the agreement signed by the two parties, Renren.com will more conveniently gain Youku-Tudou’s video contents on its website; while Youku-Tudou will gain more users and video traffic from Renren.com. Apart from focusing on search services, the two companies will realize a series of innovations, covering video sharing, video push, social wiki, and public home page.

Renren.com has already started recommending quality video content from Youku.com and Tudou.com in the sharing column of users’ homepages. The sharing column is reportedly one of the most active modules on Renren.com; it is the website’s only official portal for video recommendations. In addition, Renren.com upgraded the public homepages of Youku.com and Tudou.com, which is expected to bring more attention and traffic to the two websites.

Prior to this, Renren.com acquired the entire stake in the Chinese video website 56.com. Zhou Juan, founder of 56.com said that this video website focused on user-generated content and video social media. Unlike that acquisition, the cooperation between Renren.com and Youku-Tudou will be oriented towards long-format videos, which will save a large amount of copyright fees for Renren.com.

Renren.com started cooperating with Youku.com and Tudou.com in June 2010 when they jointly announced that users could enter the two video websites by using their Renren accounts.