I just watched an interview of Tudou’s founders, Gary Wang and Marc Vander Chijs. Wang makes an interesting remark, stating that Todou serves 15 billion minutes per month as opposed to Youtube’s 3.5 billion.

A big contributor to Tudou’s numbers could be its copyrighted content. Wang does state that its users often use the site as they would use a TV. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a couple of American movies or TV series on that site. Youtube was largely the same in its early days. While the page views of Tudou are probably less, it is growing exponential. Watch out for this major player.

After talking to Europeans, I realized the general consensus seems to be that American companies tend to be very slow when expanding to foreign markets. I think it’s important for entrepreneurs to get themselves familiar with the Chinese internet market. Not only is it such a huge market, it’s definitely going to be a major influence the industry.

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However, being the internet-junkie that I am, I had to test out exactly how severe the internet censorship was. Specifically, I wanted to see which blogs are censored.

The experiment: I tried to access the Technorati Top 100 list. The rankings are determined how many other websites link to these top blogs. I used Safari to see which blog gave me a timed-out page.

These are blogs I cannot access:

• Post Secret (ranked #9)
• Seth Godin’s Blog (ranked #13)
• icanhascheezburger (ranked #14)
• Official Google Blog (ranked #15)
• Guy Kawasaki (ranked #21)
• Head Rush (ranked #23)
• Scobleizer (ranked #33)
• Google System (ranked #98)

These are the unlucky “A-list” bloggers. I also tried pinging their URL’s from the command line. Please let me know your results are different from mine. Also, I’d be happy to test out your blogs during my remaining days here. Luckily, my blog is accessible; though things might change after this post … (cross my fingers).

While I’m on the topic, here’s a cool picture of all the thriving startup’s half way across the world. Behind the online censorships are websites about to revolutionize the way 1 billion people use the internet.