SOHU.COM, China's third-largest Internet portal, will upgrade its eight-million-member blog channel to make it more like a video-sharing site such as YouTube to increase traffic and user loyalty, it said yesterday.
No advertising will appear on the bloggers' front pages, as the current priority lies in attracting more users to the renewed service, especially those of its bigger rival Sina.com.
"We are not worried about how to make money (from the updated blog service) at this stage," said Charles Zhang, Sohu's chairman and chief executive officer.
"As long as we have more and more loyal users, there are always ways to cash in."
The updated version, to be launched next month in a big gala of Sohu bloggers in a park in Beijing, will allow users to upload their own videos and share with others, who don't have to download any extra software to play the clips.
Currently Sohu's blogs only allow text and audio clips. The Website has a separate broadband video channel for entertainment news and clips, but they are not uploaded by Web users.
As to the copyright issue, Sohu will monitor uploaded content and conduct its own censorship, said Fang Gang, vice editor-in-chief for Sohu.
More than 76 million Web users in China watched or uploaded videos on video-sharing sites last year, according to the Internet Society of China. It estimated the number of video-sharing users will grow by 40 percent a year on average over the next three years.
Meanwhile, the number of video-sharing sites increased greatly in China last year, especially after Google's US$1.65 billion takeover of YouTube.com. There were more than 250 such sites in December, compared to 30-odd in January last year.
Portals and search engines are also busy building their video portfolios. Tom.com, controlled by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, launched an updated version of its video channel early this month.
Sina.com, the nation's No. 1 portal and also runner of the most popular blog site, famous for celebrities' blogs, also teamed up with China Telecom, the nation's largest broadband provider, to launch a video-sharing platform, Sina-Vnet Podcast, last month.
Zhang of Sohu said they hadn't decided whether to develop a function on its video-sharing channel to help Sina's users to move to its server.