| With the continuous development of P2 P and streaming media technology, Internet is going broadband at a high speed and evolving into video multimedia. Service providers are trying to expand the profit margins and seek for new profit models through getting the most out of the innovative content and ways of propagation of new media, and video sharing has become a new focus on the Internet. Founded in February of 2005, You Tube became an instant success by providing the possibility of sharing and searching video clips and rapidly grew into the largest video-sharing platform in the world within a short period of time, with more than 100 million clicks every day. Video-sharing websites also gained quick popularity. Since the launch of the first video-sharing website, www.tudou.com in April of 2005, Chinese video-sharing websites have been in existence for more than 11 years so far, having experienced risk capital competitive investments, horizontal competitions, copyright disputes, soaring royalty fees, competitions between portals and television organizations, bandwidth pressure and self-made drama fads. Now the video-sharing websites have entered a mature development phase, and the market structure has become clear and the video-sharing websites are taking the leading position in the entire Internet industry. Internet videos have developed rapidly over the past 11 years with over 504 million users by the end of 2015, which is 70.93 million more than 2014, and the usage rate of Internet video is 73.2%, which is 6.5% higher than 2014. And there are 405 million mobile phone video users, which is 92.28 million more than 2014 with a growth rate of 29.5 %, and the usage rate of mobile phone video users is 65.4%, which is 9.2% higher than 2014. The professionals within both the industry and the academic circles have been trying to explore new profit models, but the video-sharing websites are still depending primarily on advertising and all are running in the red due to the cost of bandwidth and contents.The paper analyzes the profit dilemma that the video-sharing websites face by introducing the emergence and the categories and features of the websites and analyzing the historical financial data of the major video-sharing websites of both home and abroad. The paper takes the Youku-Tudou Group as an example, analyzing its status quo, revealing its major problems and putting forward solutions to the existing problems from the perspectives of cost structure, confirmation and accounting methods so as to propose some feasible methods to help the Chinese video industry to gain profit. |
