Sohu’s getting into video sharing; new reports indicate that “China’s premier online brand” will launch a service within the next week. This should nicely round out Sohu’s current crop of products.
“The overall strategy of Sohu is to be not only a news portal but also a big community – like MySpace,” said Charles Zhang, Sohu’s chairman, in an interview with Sophie Taylor.
And on that note, I’ll move on to Sohu’s list of accomplishments. Now, when quoting companies’ statements, I often make fun of them – the claims can get kinda wild. Yet Sohu’s description is largely accurate. “Sohu has built one of the most comprehensive matrices of Chinese language web properties and proprietary search engines,” it begins.
The description then names “www.sohu.com, the mass portal and leading online media destination,” “an interactive search engine,” “the #1 online alumni club,” “a top real estate and home furnishing website,” “the #1 games information portal,” “a wireless value-added services provider,” and “a leading online mapping service provider.”
So, yeah, in terms of diversity, a video-sharing service will fit in just fine with the rest of Sohu’s offerings. It will probably also measure up in terms of quality; Sohu is, after all, the company from which Google copied some data.
Reuters reports that “Sohu – ‘search fox’ in Chinese – like many others is trying to gain traction against heavyweights Google Inc. and Baidu.com Inc., which together command three-quarters of the search engine market in China.” This new video-sharing site will probably help Sohu do precisely that.
