From the star to the interest, the Micro-blog revised to bring commercialization

Online 5 years, Sina Weibo's web version of the iteration to the 6.0 version, two years ago it just removed the logo next to "Beta" words. Weibo, although not as many people think of as the Chinese Facebook, but still handed over a fairly good answer-day active users (DAU) 69.7 million, monthly active users (MAU) 156 million.

The excitement on the platform does not seem to have made Weibo itself more profitable, with a 2-quarter revenue of 77.3 million dollars in 14, up 105% per cent, but still a loss of 15.4 million dollars. As a product into the mature stage, the pressure on profitability inevitably increased, and every time the revision has naturally become more cautious.

Notably, Lin Shuiyang, deputy general manager of Weibo, in introducing the growth of Weibo, mentioned the data, "Users on the micro-blog information consumption is increasing, compared to the 13 Q2 Sina Weibo PC users monthly browsing page number increased by 35%."

For Weibo, such growth is not necessarily a good thing, because the trend of microblogging media tends to have the risk of overloading users ' information, compared to strictly social products. A friend who has been spitting a lot of micro-letters and friends, brush the circle like a micro-bo, this may be seen from another perspective on the Micro-blog information overload awareness.

This is a way for Weibo to go, because the user's demand for micro-blogging and expectations are expanding, we are no longer on Weibo follow a star, Big V, but according to their interest to get more differentiated content. The problem, however, is that the simple focus is on the user's easy attention to hundreds of small and medium V and friends, and the cost of discovering and acquiring the content is greatly increased.

The greatest significance of the new version of Weibo may not be that it is more like a mobile end of the end of the unified, but more refreshing interface and easier to achieve content grouping.

On the one hand, the micro-blog deleted a large number of functions on the left side of the function, which greatly highlighted the status of the group, this and micro-Bo to build the relationship between people and interests of the starting point is consistent, it does make it easier for users to achieve group switching.

But, how many people in the attention of a certain micro-blog account will develop a clear habit of grouping? Although there are smart recommended groupings. It seems that good habits need to be picked up from the earlier links.

On the other hand, Weibo uses more like Facebo ... Oh, more like the micro-blog mobile end of the information flow page design, card design style so that each micro-blog content becomes more prominent, so that users can more easily implement the forwarding, comments and other interactive functions.

Twitter's focus is shifting from stars, Big V to interest content and the people who produce them, and this is evident in the design of their personal pages.

In the context of the card style, the new version of microblogging provides users with more exclusive features to choose, so that these people better production, dissemination of content, but also easier to realize commercialization. Of course, this commercialization is based on the creation of Weibo's own rules of the game rather than the barbaric growth of the old grassroots, which provides more commercial exploration and direction for the future of Weibo.

To music people, for example, Weibo highlights its song "Play" this core function, while providing paid downloads, concert tickets and other functional modules. According to the data provided by Weibo, more than 20 musicians were involved in the current testing phase and more than 100,000 users paid for downloading songs.

Of course, Weibo's efforts to focus on individuals are clearly more than that, it has not taboo its media characteristics, but the past popular microblogging functions such as integration, played a new card-"discovery" channel, aggregation of high-quality content, and provide rewards, paid subscriptions, advertising and other functions.

But is it true that Chinese users who are accustomed to viewing content for free will pay for content on Weibo? Weibo showed confidence that they came up with a set of data: a 2-month test period, 30,000 hits, paid subscriptions totaling over 1.5 million; in the past quarter, Weibo has received nearly 3.5 million yuan in revenue from the media.

Weibo hopes to bring more quality content producers into its own business system, thereby highlighting their importance in terms of functionality and motivating them to create business models. Rather than let these large and small V to rely on advertising, soft text such way to realize the realization, after all, such a way to become more prone to harm the user experience, and micro Bo as the platform itself will not get any benefits.

However, the number of users who can be involved in the pyramid, or even the very few who are at the cusp of the pyramids, is a challenge for new content producers to get more attention and faster growth as they enter the entire platform. Of course, many people do not seem to be willing to face up to such a problem, but choose the newer, more easy to become famous platform, such as micro-credit public number, today's headlines.

Of course, Weibo is connected not only to the people who produce the content, but also to the content itself, such as songs, movies, books, and so on. As early as last year, Weibo created a number of independent page for them, with only 6 million music fields. Weibo hopes to make the network between people, organizations, things and interests more intensive and stable.

"In essence, Weibo is a user-focused information discovery Network," Lin Shuiyang this comment on the current microblogging, the new version of Weibo is obviously to reduce the information on this network discovery costs, and the future will do is to the network of those vertical areas to infiltrate, looking for a better commercial direction than advertising. Weibo also does not want to be called "Taobao window".

Just this once, from the stars to the interest, from the big V to the individual, from the all-inclusive to the vertical, the commercialization of Weibo will go?