YouTube

Today YouTube has become the destination to watching videos online; from music videos and movie trailers to news and vlogs, YouTube has it all. It is free to use the service. Although numerous other video sites available out there, not any one of them has got close to reaching the youtube’s global cultural ubiquity and gigantic content catalog.

The headquarters of YouTube is situated in San Bruno, California. The service initiated in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Cohen and Jawed Karim, who were the former PayPal employees. Later in 2006, this site was bought by Google for 1.65 Billion US Dollars.

There are some ways in which YouTube has successfully primed for the future but also some areas that need further working.

The strong points of YouTube include:

·       It has been generating revenue from more just advertisement

·       It is catering towards YouTube’s most passionate groups of fans

·       It is forming a deep slate towards original programming

·       It has built a very modern global studio system

·       YouTube has now become a mobile-first experience

The weak areas of YouTube are as follows:

·       It needs rebuilding trust with advertisers

·       The relationship of YouTube remains fraught with its creators

·       It is the largest music streamer in the entire world which is a problem to the music trade organizations

The features of YouTube include:

·       Uploading: the users are enabled to upload videos up to 15 minutes each in duration.

·       Quality and formats: offering videos at a resolution of 7680x4320 pixels now.

·       Annotations: users are able to add pop-up text messages and hyperlinks.

·       Live streaming: it is available to 4K resolution at 60 fps and also supports 360 degrees video.

·       Reels: the stories of YouTube, just like those on Snapchat and Instagram, are called reels with a length of up to 30 seconds.

Youku

Youku Tudou Inc., a Chinese word meaning ‘excellent’ or ‘cool’ is one of China’s top online video hosting services. It is based in Beijing, China and operates as a subsidiary of Alibaba Group Holding Limited. There are more than 500 million monthly users of Youku. It has 800 million daily views on its videos. It has shows and films streaming services that are different from YouTube.

It was first found by Victor Koo, who is the former president of the Internal portal Sohu. The formal launch of the site took place in December of, 2006. Initially Youku focus on user-generated content, however soon it shifted its emphasis towards the videos they were professionally produced and licensed from more than 1,500 content partners

According to internet metrics provider CR-Nielsen, in January 2010 the site Youku.com was ranked in the #1 Chinese internet video sector. 

YouTube Vs Youku

Although YouTube and Youku both enable the basics of the types of ads like the media, pop-ups and banner ads; however, Youku is more dynamic than YouTube as it provides more options. Youku has different pre-rolls; it has got pause ads and also the corner logos that YouTube does not have.

YouTube’s longer pre-rolls have an option to be skipped after they are played for 5 seconds. On the other hand, such pre-rolls cannot be omitted in Youku. This is kind of annoying for the viewer who does not seem interested in viewing the entire ad.

Most of the users of Youku, excluding the few who pay and are the VIP users, are not given the option to skip the ads even after the short 5 seconds.

The ads are paused in Youku like when the users click on the pause button, the pause advertisement pops on the screen and remains onscreen for as long as the video is paused. Most of the time, they are the still images with highlighted keywords and a simple layout.

Youku merged with Toledo, and the Alibaba Group acquired it in 2015. It was after that that the site began to combine the e-commerce and online video in different ways. Now matched stores or original video creators can add product ads. The users will be taken to T-mall or the Taobao store of the brand when they click on the corner logos in Youku. This turns out to be a win-win situation for the shops and online creators. It also allows the “See Now, Buy Now” function to play a part. The case is not that YouTube lacks this function; but it lacks the close cooperation with the platforms that are e-commerce, for example, Amazon, hence the ads on YouTube only link to the brands’ official web.

In Youku, the brands are enabled to add short promotion or campaign video after a general ad. Moreover, there are other useful functions in Youku like polls, original content verification, and adding a text layer to the videos.

The most open difference in YouTube and Youku channel is the option of setting up an online store in Youku's menu bar. There is no such ease on YouTube. In this way, Youku provides the users with the ease to buy what they come across in the video within a matter of a few minutes. This is beneficial to the sellers too, as this clearly boosts up the sales simultaneously.

Now as far as catering for brands is put into light, Youku is crystal clearly so much better than youtube.

However, YouTube is a platform that Google has it put its many year's refining, and it shows. YouTube not only supports creators and marketers to some extent but does it in a way that is safer than other options.

When it comes to legal proceedings, YouTube has been through the gamut. YouTube has stood bright as an example of doing things the right way.

Robust content ID system is what YouTube has in order to prevent fraudulent copies of videos. This helps the owners of the copyright to identify the content on the site and manage it easily. Currently,

YouTube is the only site with the robust content ID system; this is the one system they spent lots of money and time developing.

Another fantastic thing about YouTube is that anyone can monetize on YouTube. On other sites, the major publishers who sign a deal with the site are the only ones who can put themselves into some hopes of receiving revenue from their content.

YouTube also undoubtedly has got outstanding analytics data as they have been improving it from years now. This is how it gets more comfortable for you to get an overview of what happens in the videos played.

EndNote

By the above information provided, we can conclude that when it comes to satisfying the viewers and users uploading content, YouTube still remains the king of online video streaming. On the other hand, advertisers give more prominence to Youku as Youku does the same for them.