Calling Chinese Couch Potatoes

Gary Wang, founder of Toodou, which allows Chinese users to post video and audio clips online, discusses content, censorship, and future plans

Toodou means "potato" in Mandarin. But Gary Wang hopes it will soon become synonymous with podcasts and video blogs. Wang is founder of a Shanghai startup called Toodou, which allows Chinese users to post material such as homemade music videos, cute pet spots, and short art films.

Wang, a 32-year-old native of Fujian Province who has a master's degree in computer science from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from Insead, met recently with BusinessWeek's Hong Kong correspondent, Frederik Balfour, to discuss Toodou, the broader Internet in China, and the issue of censorship on the Chinese Web. (For more on this topic, see BW Online, 1/23/06, "Testing China's Web Tolerance") Edited excerpts follow:

Why did you choose to call your company "Potato"?
It's fun, and it's a play on the idea of couch potato.

Why podcasting?
The idea came out of pure boredom in September, 2004, while we [Wang and co-founder, Dutchman Marc van der Chijs] were driving back from a golf game. We thought podcasting was something cool and were sure it was going to take off. It didn't seem like it would take a huge investment -- only 1 million yuan [$125,000] for the first nine months.

Did you do any marketing to get the company off the ground?
No, it was all word of mouth, and we were lucky to get lots of media coverage. At first we got about five audio clips a day. Now we get, on average, 150 videos and 100 audios. We get about 40,000 visitors per day to the site and have 30,000 clips -- 60% video, 40% audio.

What's the most popular clip?
A girl dancing in a bar. We don't know where it was filmed or who she is. It has gotten more than 225,000 hits. The second-most popular is of an underground band, called Beautiful Pharmacy, in Shanghai during a performance.

So this is a bootleg?
Call it guerrilla video. All these bands and underground moviemakers love it when someone promotes their work.

How heavily are you regulated?
It's very difficult to regulate these kinds of things, just as 10 years ago it was very difficult to regulate text on the Internet. In general, the government is becoming more open-minded and tolerant.

For example, a TV reporter in Hunan did a story for his local station about a middle-aged woman who adopted 20 homeless kids in a poor county, but his boss wouldn't run the story. So the reporter put it on Toodou. Then a producer in Shanghai saw it, got in touch with the reporter, and sent a team to Hunan to do detailed reporting. The broadcast was extremely popular. It shows that censorship is relative to the authorities involved.

Do you practice self-censorship?
Yes. We have volunteers who work at home and log on to our system to look at each clip. They decide whether to let it pass.

What do they reject?
Pornography and anything that's obviously anti-government. Falun Gong is a no-no. If you put that word in your article, it probably won't get posted in China. So no porn, no explicitly disgusting stuff that will upset a lot of people.

Other than that, anything goes. For example, we have a video clip, viewed quite a lot, of high school girls slapping a classmate. A lot of people were upset, but we said it's not our business to interfere. We want it to be as free as possible.

Why would anyone want to watch video clips done by amateurs?
Because most people are bored by what they look at every day. You see people nodding off on the subway. One day soon, a lot of these people will be listening to stuff on mobile phones, or looking at videos, or playing games. We will be the one who provides them with short clips they can kill some time with.

Do you have any revenues?
No, we are really trying to build a platform. At this point, to come up with a robust revenue model requires a lot more users than we currently have. We only have 160,000 registered users. We need about 1 million, which we should get within a year. Then we can sell advertising.

And when the 3G mobile-phone network is in place, we'll be able to charge for content. People think the Internet is for free, but they're used to paying for everything they download to their phones.

Has it been hard to find funding?
IDG gave us several hundred thousand dollars recently. I didn't go out knocking on doors to raise money. People contacted us. It helped that people saw the Baidu (BIDU ) and Alibaba deals, and feel that the Internet space is heating up. Venture capitalists have a lot more confidence that they will be able to make a decent exit.

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