Microblogging is more complex

The commercialization process of Sina Weibo is a major aspect of China's internet this year, and in order to commercialize it, the more complex the microblogging is, the Unite point of the user.

"Global Entrepreneur" sent an article, asked, Sina Weibo why Sibuxiang? Why not stick to a short-sleeved gown, like Twitter doing just not imitating Facebook?

Sina's difficulties are:

First, there are serious performance pressures. Sina's 2012 quarterly bulletin showed a net loss of $13.7 million in the quarter. The net profit for the same period last year was 15 million dollars. Before the lack of performance expectations, Tencent and other opponents of the press, the commercialization of Sina Weibo is imminent.

After the introduction of a fee membership system, a media launch a vote, the results show: 6548 people vote, willing to spend money to become a member of only 2.5%, but as of May 16, 2012, Sina Weibo registered users 324 million, according to 2.5% willing to pay to calculate, there are 8.1 million micro-blog members, There are still 81 million yuan per month. This is undoubtedly a good news for Sina's performance.

Second, Sina is the media origin, the technical ability is limited. Sina has 200,000 applications on the platform, but how about Sina Weibo? Some people are reluctant to use Sina's own mobile client, preferring to choose between micro-or weico. Even expanding to a dating platform is a copycat for Tencent, such as shaking. In stark contrast to Twitter, which introduces new applications and functions almost every few days, Twitter tries to pinpoint the needs of users and push the ads they need most, in order to avoid the impact of ads on the user experience.

The social platform needs the operator to have the strong data mining and the user behavior data analysis ability, through to the user relations, the behavior data, the propagation path mining analysis, can better achieve the advertisement and the user match. Sina can do? Try Sina Weibo search function, the answer is not self-evident. There are almost no optimizations for keywords, it's hard to match the results you want, you still need to look in the haystack.

Third, the revenue of the portal advertising may be due to the decline of Sina Weibo, a short period of time Sina will be the right-hand and the other. Sina, which has maintained its first position in the 5-year portal ad revenue, was overtaken by Tencent in the first quarter, that is, Tencent ranked first in advertising revenue at $85.8 million over Sina's 78.5 million dollars. This is not the most serious, more serious is, the chain of portal advertising has fallen more and more, the 2011 Q4 quarter, Sina's advertising revenue is 104 million U.S. dollars, Tencent's 95 million dollars.

The drop in portal advertising is forcing Sina to speed up the commercialization of microblogs. However, the rise of micro-blog advertising can make up for Sina's overall income? The same is the Internet advertising, the money is also the advertisers, they are certain microblogging ads at the same time, will continue to put the traditional portal ads? This must be an increase in the situation.

Four, Weibo has assumed the task of building a Sina platform. Tencent will also build the next generation of social platforms, but Weibo is just one of the value-added services. So Tencent did not "shake" the copy to Weibo, but with "blow". This feature is particularly similar to the Snapnest application on the Twitter platform, which uses the iphone's location-aware function to search for nearby images. It's just "blown" to expand it all over the world with randomness. From this point of view, Tencent Weibo has done more like Twitter, a simple information-sharing center, not another heavy social platform. Increasingly heavy Sina how Tencent Dou? Tencent Weibo registered accounts at the end of the first quarter to 425 million, Sina Weibo is only 324 million.

The most difficult is the control risk. On April 28, Sina submitted its 2011 Annual report to the U.S. SEC, which mentions two risks the company is facing: a monetization model for microblogs and possible penalties for inadequate regulation. On March 31, Sina Weibo closed its comment function for three days, in conjunction with the Government's clean-up of user reviews related to certain rumours. Also occurred in March, had already reached a search cooperation with Baidu, allowing the latter to crawl the micro-blog data, presented in the search results, but not long before the government asked to cut off such search crawl. Will users pay for such an uncontrolled information-sharing Center? How to guarantee the interests of advertisers?

Sina Weibo can only look for a way to find a business model that fits China's national conditions. It's just that the road is really tough, Chao said, the six major business models that Weibo may have: interactive precision advertising, social gaming, real-time search, unlimited value-added services, e-commerce platforms, and digital content charges. A self-service advertising system will be launched in the second half. But what kind of user experience are they based on? Many people doubt that Sina Weibo's active users are less than 50 million, how valuable is this data to advertisers?