Friday night the Tudou New Year Party was held at The Melting Pot, one of the better bars on Taikang Lu (Shanghai’s art street). The staff from Spill Group Asia had rented a small bus to drive there, but I decided to take a cab from my apartment because I had to wait for my wife to come home first. Of course we then could not find a cab (rain on a friday night equals no taxis), so I drove there myself. So we were a bit too late, but just in time for the announcements. Yang Lei was the presenter of the evening, and after her Gary gave a speech. During his speech Gary announced that Tudou is growing very fast, and this week managed to break through the 10 million films per day! Especially the past weeks the growth has been stellar, and it seems none of our competitors is able to keep up with us.
The Tudou staff had made a video, showing all our ‘records’ plus the dates they occurred (50K views/day, 100K, 500K, 1 million, 2 million, 5 million, 10 million) and some of the clips that were submitted around that time. Interesting to see was that the time between the dates of the records got shorter and shorter. Some of the clips in the video were quite funny and I had not seen most of them. After the video was shown we made a human 10,000,000 sign ( Gary was the 1, and 2 people each made a 0).
Lots of friends attended the party, and I talked the whole evening with all kinds of people. Gary and Qi were sitting at the table with some VIP guests, but I mainly walked around. Got to know some interesting new people, and for the rest just had a relaxed evening with a couple of beers. After 10 PM the official party ended, but it actually got even better after that. The live band continued to play great songs (although a bit too loud at times). Only downside was that we managed to drink all the Tudou-sponsored beer and had to start paying for it ourselves 🙂
The next party will likely be a rooftop party again in the Tudou office, but that has to wait until spring will arrive in Shanghai.
It was nice to meet you finally Marc. Thanks for having me. It was a great showing, the place was packed and everyone was having a good time. I even managed to learn a few new drinking games unfortunately. Tudou is really an amazing company and I look forward to hearing more about it in the future.
Glad to hear you liked it, and I’m sure you’ll hear more about Tudou in the near future.