With an Eye on Mobile Video Viewers, Youku and Sina Weibo Form a Partnership

With an eye to the many Sina Weibo users who access the Twitter-like service via mobile, two of China’s web giants have formed an interesting partnership today. The buddying up deal sees Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) agreeing to promote videos on Sina Weibo from Youku Tudou (NYSE:YOKU), the merged company that runs two of China’s top video sites.

Youku’s announcement points out that 76 percent of Sina Weibo’s daily active users access Weibo through mobile devices; meanwhile, Youku Tudou have around 170 million daily mobile video viewers right now.

The video content promotion will start throughout Weibo in July. The promos will take “multiple forms including through personalized recommendation section embedded between micro-blogging posts.” Less annoyingly – and actually pretty usefully – “search results for movies and TV dramas will provide direct thumbnail links to watch the title instantly”. There’s something that would never happen on Twitter.

(See: How China’s Top Video Site Battles the Pirates)Youku Tudou president Dele Liu said today:

Creating and sharing content is at the core of the Internet, and Youku Tudou’s cooperation with social networking sites such as Weibo is a powerful move towards deepening consumers’ online video viewing and sharing experience.

Youku is, by most measurements, China’s top video site, with a mix of user-generated content and Hulu-like streaming of licensed TV and movie content from around the world.

Sina Weibo has over 500 million registered users, but only about 46.3 million of them are daily active users. Plus, many people use third-party Weibo apps, so not all of them will necessarily see the new promoted video content once it comes online.