Video

Following our coverage of China's Facebook clones, our attention now turns to what one may originally have called YouTube clones (as that is very much the idea most were based on), but really it is more fair to treat them as stand-alone video sharing sites. These sites have done very well because of two key factors:
1) In the early days, YouTube and other international competitors were simply not fast enough at streaming video through the Great Firewall of China.
2) China's Internet was really built on the back of broadband technologies and so it pretty much skipped the slow dial-up Internet speeds much of the West had to start with.
These two factors combined essentially make China one big intranet, serving up most sites hosted within China at lightning speeds.