China’s top video streaming site now getting 900M views each day

China’s top online video company just released new data in its latest earnings report (for Q4 2014). In terms of eyeballs, Youku Tudou now gets 900 million video views each day – an all-time high that has tripled since October 2013.

The company, which runs two video sites, Youku and Tudou, after their merger in 2012, didn’t disclose an updated figure for monthly unique visitors (that was 500 million back in Q2 2014), but a Youku representative tells Tech in Asia that the sites now get 150 million daily active users.

All the other figures from Youku Tudou relate to financials. These are the highlights for whole-year 2014:

• Net revenues hit RMB 4 billion (US$649.5 million), up 33 percent from 2013.
• Profit was once again an elusive concept as it racked up a net loss of RMB 888.6 million (US$143.2 million), which is up sharply from RMB 580.7 million (US$93.6 million) in 2013.
• Sales and marketing expenses went up, but operating expenses went down.

See: Controversial documentary about pollution is now being scrubbed from China’s web

Tough to get viewers to pay

For Q4 2014 itself, Youku and Tudou collectively saw rising revenues from things like advertising and paid subscriptions, but content costs also rocketed as China’s main video sites – like Tencent Video, iQiyi, Sohu Video, and LeTV – rush to produce more original video series so as to differentiate themselves from rivals and also to head off upcoming restrictions on foreign TV shows put into place by China’s media regulator.

As an alternative stream of revenue and to keep its brand alive in the age of smart home gadgets, Youku recently got into hardware with a wifi router, set-top box, and Android tablet. Here are some Q4 highlights:

• Q4 2014 ad revenues grew to RMB 1.1 billion (US$177.1 million), up 37 percent from the same period a year before.
• Consumer revenues from subscription-based and pay-per-view services reached RMB 69.7 million (US$11.2 million), up a substantial 649 percent year-on-year. However, the number is still very low relative to the number of active users and monetizing directly from viewers for big-name movies and TV dramas is still a major challenge.
• Content costs as a component of cost of revenues were RMB 602.9 million (US$97.2 million) in Q4, representing 48 percent of net revenues as compared to 39 percent of net revenues for the corresponding period in 2013.