Youku Tudou announced today a strategic partnership with Sina Weibo. Sina Weibo will set up Pages for each movies and TV dramas where Weibo users can read the information about the title, write comments or reviews, and interact with others. But users cannot watch a video directly on a Page that will be directed to Youku Tudou’s sites instead. Whenever a user searches for a video that already has such a Page, he or she will be lead to the page.
Last month Sina Weibo released the Page, a mini-site for each movies, music, books and items you can think of — Yes, exactly what Douban has been doing, hoping to create a whole lot content for users to consume and interact with. So, Sina must be happy to reach deals with other video sites who have videos Youku Tudou doesn’t have and music sites, book sites and the like for a tie-up.
The announcement says the two parties will also work together on paid offerings, saying “Youku Tudou and Weibo will cross-promote each other’s premium members and their content. ” — Both of them offer users subscription-based services. Possibly they’ll share revenues then.
47.7% and 15.3% of links of videos shared on Sina Weibo were from Youku and Tudou, respectively, in the past April, the top two in this metric, according to Sina Weibo.