China's Video Sharing Gold Rush is Over

Sophie Taylor over at Reuters has written an excellent article noting that the rats investors are leaving the sinking video sharing sites around China.

Apparently, after YouTube scored a sweet $1.65 billion from Google's cash hoard last year, a whole lot of people in China decided to start their own video sharing sites - before, of course, they thought through a small detail called a way to make money off of all those videos.

Video sharing looks like a typical Chinese "one guy got rich doing this so we can, too" pile-on. According to the article, there are over 400 video sharing sites in China that shared US$ 64 million in revenues last year. Now, it can be cheap to run a business in China, but average revenue of $161,000 per site?

So the implosion is coming, and investors are heading for the door.

What's Next?

Now that Reuters has been good enough to point out one place online where there is too much investment, the obvious next question is "where else is this happening online in China?"

Games?

Social networking?