We do indeed live in a global village now. People in America have been talking about the YouTube phenomenon because the site came from nowhere to become one of the top destinations on the Web in less than a year, and in a flash sharp-nosed Chinese Internet fortune seekers smelled the success and created over 150 such video-sharing companies in a few months.

Among them, the six-month-old video-sharing site YoQoo, which was founded by former Sohu President Victor Koo, recently raised $12 million in funding from a group of venture capital firms, including Sutter Hill Ventures, based in California's Silicon Valley, and Chengwei Ventures, which claims to be one of the first independent venture capital funds in China.

YoQoo says it is one of the top video sharing and distribution platforms in China with thousands of videos uploaded each day by both consumers and media organizations.

The Chinese site has almost all the features that YouTube has, such as uploading, tagging and sharing videos, creating and joining groups to make contact with other users, browser and subscription video channels, and using HTML snippets to embed videos in blogs or websites. One of its special features is that it allows any user to set a topic for a video contest, then he and other users can upload videos consistent with that topic for users to rate.

"I like to film my puppy and upload the video to YoQoo to share it with my friends and they all like it. I really enjoy the fulfillment," said a YoQoo user known as Rong Zai.

"Our site features 'micro-videos,' which are between 30 seconds and 20 minutes and cover a wide range of subjects," said Koo.

Confining the length of the video to 20 minutes can help the site avoid the problem of the rampant piracy of films and TV series, said Koo, adding that micro-videos have more vitality and can be played in various mediums such as the Internet, mobile phones and MP4 players.

At first, Koo said, he wanted to make a quicker entry into the video-sharing market by purchasing some existing video-sharing websites, but he found that they were all immature and none was worth purchasing, so he decided to start a new one from scratch.

Boom or bust?

"Compared with its foreign counterparts, the video-sharing business in China has bigger prospects," he said. "Because our traditional media are seldom user-oriented, few grassroots users can demonstrate their creations on the traditional media platforms. But the video-sharing website offers them a low-threshold channel to show their talent and creativity."

Koo cited an example in which a girl from Sichuan called Tiantianquan filmed herself singing a song and in just a few weeks this video received more than 1 million hits.

The Internet video market represents a big field to Koo. To back up his optimistic view, he noted that the overall traffic of the world's top 10 video-sharing websites has increased 164 percent over the past three months.

However, according to Zhang Jun, marketing supervisor for OpenV, another video-sharing company, this boom is no more than another Internet bubble. "The contents of the domestic video-sharing websites lack imagination and many videos overlap among these sites. Ninety percent of the present video sites will die out," Zhang forecast.

"Many such websites are like flies rushing to the meat; they don't care about the content they provide and all they want is to generate money in a short time," he said.

In addition, all such websites face the same problem: how to develop a profitable business model.

But, according to Koo, all the previously successful business models for the Internet industry can be transplanted to the video-sharing websites. "Advertisements and user charges are two business models that Internet companies can't leave out," he said. With the development of third generation wireless systems, the downloading of video content by end-users might represent a huge gold mine.

"Or, we can cooperate with the film and video companies and serve as their marketing platform. They can put their movie trailers or behind-the-scenes clips on our website, and this will be a win-win situation," he said.