Ku6

» see ku6.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

the chinese consumer video web is a shape i can read about but never sat inside. ku6 was one of the three ugc sites that competed in that market between 2006 and 2012, the years when the western press was still calling everything in china "the youtube of X". i did not have a mainland account, never uploaded there. what i knew about ku6 came from tech blogs and the occasional forbes column about shanda's founder chen tianqiao trying to build a chinese media conglomerate around it.

kevin li founded ku6.com in 2006, the year after youtube launched in the us. he had been senior vp and editor-in-chief at sohu, one of china's top three portals, and left to build a video site inspired by the way music sharing had already taken shape online. either way, the first outside money came in 2007, a $10 million round with baidu and draper fisher jurvetson leading. the model mixed short user clips with longer licensed shows. by 2008 ku6 had the exclusive video-sharing partnership for the beijing summer olympics, which was as prominent a china-tech marketing win as you could get that year.

in november 2009 the shanda group bought ku6 for about $44 million and merged it into hurray holding, a smaller nasdaq-listed music-and-media shell. really though, that structure gave shanda a shortcut to becoming the first chinese video site on a us exchange, ticker kutv. the april 2012 pr materials claimed 220 million monthly active users with roughly 200,000 daily uploads. the number was in the same range as ku6's peers of the era. active engagement was always narrower than the paper figures suggested.

~ the record ~

~ the shanda years ~

shanda ran ku6 through the 2010-2015 window while the actual market consolidated around youku and tudou. those two merged in 2012 to lock the mainstream. ku6 kept a live product and kept publishing quarterly filings but the revenue never held up. in those days shanda was also unwinding its own broader media strategy. by 2013 the ku6 quarterly reports were showing revenue in the low single-digit millions with operating losses on the same line.

~ the delisting ~

nasdaq listing rules require a minimum share price and a minimum shareholder equity threshold. ku6 fell below both at different points in 2013 and 2014, got the standard non-compliance letters, then more of them. shanda decided in 2015 to take the company private and finished the transaction in august 2016. the delisting closed the ticker. the ku6.com consumer site kept operating in a much smaller form after that, mostly as a licensing operation rather than a ugc destination.

~ what stays ~

ku6 sits in the shape of the chinese web that existed before the mobile-video app cycle took over. the era when a portal video product was still built around desktop uploads on top of a keyword-search category tree. by the time bytedance shipped douyin in 2016 the whole model ku6 had been built on was already historical. what shanda held onto was the brand and a shrinking library, not a living service.

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