Will the three-way battle for supremacy now raging in China’s video sharing marketplace between Tudou, Youku, and 56.com  — some would include a fourth, Ku6.com — ultimately be decided by the respective size of the combatants’ war chests? In this costly contest, money certainly matters: without significant content differentiation, delivering a glitchless user experience is really the way to win, and that costs money for bandwidth, for servers, for content delivery networks (CDNs — either your own or offered by third parties). For consumers, this is great: All the major Chinese video sharing sites deliver very smoothly, at least within China.

If, as the Roman rhetorician and statesman Cicero famously said, “endless money forms the sinews of war,” then Shanghai-based Tudou’s new infusion of cash has given it some stout sinews. I won’t out the investors here — not the new ones, anyway, who’ve followed earlier investors IDG, Granite Global Vetures, and General Catalyst in putting in new money at what’s said to be a $150 million valuation. But hats off for being able to close this round during the harrowing run-in with SARFT, which some have described as a near-death situation for Tudou. Instead, I’ll just post below the English translation — theirs — of the press release I just got from the company announcing their new round.

Recently there have been lots of rumors in the media about our funding. Originally we didn’t plan on making a big announcement, but it seems our silence only generated more questions and speculation, so we thought it best to issue an official statement confirming that we have closed our fourth round of funding.  Our “Series D” (as they call it) was for an additional $57 million USD, which we see as sufficient to support our expansion plans for a significant time going forward.  We were very happy that our existing investors decided to double-down on us by re-investing in this round, and we were also very happy to welcome a couple of new investors, family and venture funds from Singapore and the US who prefer to remain unnamed for now.  In addition to our earlier funding rounds (500k, 8.5M, and 19M), we’ve now raised a total of $85 million.

Everybody knows that video sharing websites require a huge amount of bandwidth and servers to maintain a good service level to users; and as the #1 video sharing website in China, Tudou needs the most bandwidth and servers of all. Users constantly want faster delivery and higher resolution videos, which although expensive we are happily doing by rolling out H.264 high definition videos across the entire site.  With over 100 million clip views & page views to over 10 million unique users every day & over 60 million unique users every month, we support a huge amount of high definition videos streaming out to about a third of China’s 175 million broadband internet users.

We know $57 million sounds like a lot – and is probably the largest amount ever raised for a pure-play Chinese Internet company in one round – but actually we turned down offers of even higher funding, because this industry is not about raising more money.  We believe that the healthy development of China’s video sharing industry is about providing better services to users, advertisers, and content creators.  This round of funding will allow Tudou to create a business model that lets media-hungry consumers demand their entertainment anytime and anywhere, allows advertisers to target demographics precisely and accurately, and fosters innovative content creators to receive just compensation.

Video sharing has come to a critical junction in its development as an industry.  With this new round of funding, we now have the resources to patiently build up a solid business model and a healthy, viable ecosystem for all of our partners.

Happy 3rd Birthday Tudou, and check out our nominees of our first Tudou Film Festival online, as well as videos of the April 26th party at Moganshan.

Moganshan, at which I was present as a judge (really, just a hander-outer of awards), was a hell of a lot of fun, and thanks to Gary Wang (who’s off soon, with co-founder Marc van der Chijs, to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro!) and Dan Brody (who just completed an half Iron Man triathlon in Hainan) for having me along and for reminding me how I really could be in better shape.

I will, I must add, maintain strict impartiality toward Tudou and the other guys, who I also count as friends.