Chinese users can now shop from Alibaba while watching videos on Youku

Alibaba Group and Youku Tudou, the leading Chinese video site in which the former has a stake, jointly announced two programs for online retailers on Alibaba marketplaces to do marketing on the video platform in different ways.

View and Buy on Youku, as the name indicates, allows viewers to buy the items shown in a video without pausing the playing video. It is enabled by Alimama, the Google AdSense-like contextual advertising program of Alibaba. Alimama display ads based on user behavior on Alibaba’s marketplaces.

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So far almost all Chinese videos sites make revenues from pre-, mid-, and post-roll ads. Youku Tudou hasn’t turned a profit with it yet. If users liked making purchases when watching a video, the transaction-based ad revenue stream could be a big help to the video site.

A similar program has been available on Sina Weibo, in which Alibaba also has a stake. The one with Sina Weibo allows retailers to post items as micro-posts that users can make purchases from without leaving their Weibo homepage.

Another marketing program announced today is Merchants’ Video Channel on Tudou which is a content marketing project that encourage businesses to produce

This story originally appeared on TechNode. Copyright 2014