Spill Group Asia, the online gaming and game development company that I set up last year Spill Group, and online video site Tudou.com both keep on growing very fast. That is also one of reasons that blogging is a bit light at the moment; others are that my internet connection at home is not working, so late night blogging is not possible, and the fact that I just spent a few days in Beijing in a hotel with only a dial-up connection – not good if you have a MacBook Pro that does not support this anymore…
Game.com.cn, currently our leading Asian gaming site, now has over 300,000 unique IP’s per day and about 6 million pageviews per day. As a comparison, around Chinese New Year (mid-February) we were still at 100,000 unique IP’s. According to iResearch game.com.cn is now the 4th biggest gaming site in China, and my aim is to be in the top 3 within a few weeks.
Zlong Games, the game development subsidiary of Spill Group Asia, also goes very well. The company has grown to over 50 artists and programmers, and will now be ‘split’ into two parts: the serious gaming division will be rebranded Seeriously and for the casual games we will start using the brand name GameDino. GameDino.com will feature all games that Zlong has built. Flash games can be copied for free from there, and downloadable games can be bought there (test versions can be played for free).
I have been working on a strategy to do more with multiplayer games, and soon we plan to launch this in China. Exact details we don’t know yet, but we might work with, or take over, an existing Chinese company (we found a very interesting one already). Next to that we also will focus more on India. In two weeks I plan to go to Mumbai to meet some companies there to see how we can work together. Interesting but hectic times!
In terms of numbers Tudou.com is doing even better than Spill Group Asia, after the USD 19 million C-round was closed a few months ago the site keeps on growing very fast. According to another iResearch report Tudou now has a 47% market share in China, based on time spent on video sites. In June we streamed 1.2 billion films on the site, and in July the clip views are up to 60 million films per day. Tudou also introduced its innovative advertising system earlier this month. Personally I think it looks very cool, and actually makes the site even nicer. If you want to read more about it check among others Kaiser Kuo’s blog post or this article in the Hollywood reporter.