Tudou Partners With Digital Element To Bring you Location Targeted Ads

Chinese online video giant, Tudou (NASDAQ:TUDO), announced that it will employ Digital Element’s NetAcuity Edge hyperlocal geolocation technology to bring location-targeted ads to users.

Tudou has huge amounts of traffic and one of its ways to generate revenue is, obviously, through ads. So by making its ads more location-aware, it will be able to serve more relevant and effective ads and thereby help advertisers reach the right group of people.

While many of the online video streaming sites in China are burning money to create original/licensed content to boost traffic and increasing ad revenue, Tudou has made a pretty smart choice partnering with Digital Element for location-based ad targeting. The company’s NetAcuity Edge is a service that can target IP addresses down to a hyperlocal level, often as specific as a postal code level, while user identities remain anonymous. Huang Dong, the CTO of Tudou, explained:

This capability should significantly enhance our ability to help advertisers target and customize advertising solutions for our Internet users.

Many of the world’s largest portals and internet services use Digital Element’s services to target advertising, to serve local content, and to manage geographic content restrictions.

While this is obviously good for Tudou, but it might be a mixed bag for some users. If a Tudou ad can now smartly target users based on precise location, users outside of China shouldn’t be able to see, for example, annoying KFC Chinese TV commercials any more. On the other hand, geo-restrictions might limited you from seeing certain content that Tudou is only licensed to show in certain areas.

Overall though, it certainly should do much to improve Tudou’s profitability with a now enhanced ability to target users based on a more precise location.