Is it too early to commercialize Sina Weibo?

An operating time of more than 3 years, the cumulative registered users 400 million, daily average active users tens of millions of internet products, but the delay can not be profitable. That's why a lot of people are rushing to commercialize Sina Weibo.

Sina Weibo itself is also very worried, especially the capital market to micro-bo commercialization of the loss of confidence, so that the company's share price continued to fall. So far, its share price has fallen from $142.4 trillion at the peak of April 2011 to about $50 trillion.

Sina Weibo, which launched its microblog business since last April, has seen its long-term financial data and commercial thinking and product performance as a step-by-step, harder to get. Let's take a look at Sina Weibo has done commercial products.

1, micro-blog members

In June 2012, Sina Weibo members officially online, the basic charge of 10 yuan/month. As a class of QQ members value-added services, Sina Weibo member services provide identity, function, mobile phone, security and games, such as "member privileges" services.

Among them, in the functional privileges, Sina Weibo for paid members, providing micro-bo shielding, top, focus on the ceiling, quietly focus on differentiated value-added services. For example, non-member users have an upper limit of 2000, while VIP1-level members are concerned about a maximum of 2500, and VIP4 members are concerned about 3000 people.

Although Sina has never published the number of micro-blog members and renewals, but from the needs of users of micro-blogging, Weibo membership function is far less attractive than expected. In fact, Sina has been trying to make Weibo a social product that can compete with QQ. So Sina Weibo members with too many of the shadow of QQ members, but microblogging and QQ belong to two different attributes of the Internet products, a QQ users can accept and like the value-added pay function, may not be accepted by micro-blogging users. For example, the red name function, friends ranking front function, QQ user demand is very high, but Sina Weibo users of this demand is not very large, and micro-blog users need an urgent custom module, advertising shielding functions, but did not appear in the membership privileges.

Does the promotion have "negative effect" in Weibo?

2. Information Flow Advertisement

SINA Business Operations strategy general Manager Ayyong in the I U.S. stock interview, summed up Sina Weibo 2012 years of advertising products. In the past 1 years, Weibo has "launched the first batch of advertising products based on the social interest spectrum (SIG) for accurate delivery, including top-bottom announcements, referral accounts, activities, topics, commodities," he said. In the four quarter of last year, released the first information based advertising products-fan headlines, for corporate microblogging fans, the next will be released based on other dimensions of information flow advertising products, including for potential fans of the SME self-service advertising system, is currently being tested, will be officially released.

Last year, during the London Olympics, Weibo tried to advertise the microblogging information, which was made by BMW China. Only then the information flow advertising is not a separate presentation, but attached to the user's concern Weibo account, in the form of text chain to the user. But this time the Olympic marketing, still is considered Sina Weibo information flow advertisement beginning.

In fact, in the microblogging commercial advertising system, Sina's most important thing is the information flow ads-a Facebook, Twitter's social media site confirms that it can increase revenue and minimize interference with the user experience of advertising products.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, Sina Weibo officially launched the Information flow advertising service. "From the effect, the information flow ads are 10 times times more effective than the right micro-blogging display," said Sina spokesman Liu. From the experience of Facebook and Twitter, with the accumulation of user data, and the optimization of algorithms, information flow advertising recommended to the user experience harm will be reduced to a very low level.

But the actual situation may be the contrary, users of micro-blog information flow ads to accept the extent of the lower than the imagination, and even very disgusted with this form of advertising. At home, information flow advertising is not as easy to accept as it might be.

@ on Hai Weibo message board

The claim of "committed to SNS Marketing" @ Hai encounter, is the best proof. In the Sina Weibo information flow advertisement advocate, the @ Hai is a very active batch. Information flow ads on the line, @ on the Hai issued a number of shopping links with the electric business marketing ads, in the form of advertising through the information flow, appearing in the user microblogging content. Although Sina clarified that the information flow advertisement only appears once in 24 hours, the user still expresses the dissatisfaction, and displays the strong resistance aversion sentiment. This aversion, reflected in the early microblog information flow ads in the comments, a large number of opposition to the voice of the @ Hai had to close the comments, only to retain the forwarding permissions. But the result is, at the @ on the HAI message board, SINA official @ Weibo promotion account, become the user vent position.

3. Display Advertisement

Sina Weibo launched the V5 version, because of the Web page elements, more ads, and suffer from user criticism. Perhaps under pressure from the commercialization of microblogs, Sina Weibo brings together hotspots, members, apps, recent developments, interested people, games and many more. Users also questioned whether Sina Weibo should be transformed into another "QQ space"?

In the mobile phone client, Sina Weibo attempts to integrate applications, elements more. In addition to information flow in the recommended content, in the client, Sina also embedded in the microblogging site Application Center, prompting users to install the application of mobile phone updates, in addition to games, lbs and other applications.

From the microblogging site and mobile clients, Sina Weibo wants to do social, want to do the application market, want to play platform, want to do from the Media Center ... Sina Weibo bearer hopes more and more, shoulder the responsibility is more and more big, the result is that it is increasingly deviating from the user's core needs. The cause of this phenomenon, in addition to the company's internal factional struggle, micro-BO product strategy positioning sway, not clear is also a major factor.

With hundreds of millions of users living, location, interest and attention, such as large data, micro-bo commercialization of the movement remains weak. Sina still has no explicit plan to commercialize the search for large data mining and search. and is microblogging commercialization really that hard?

Commercialization is a process of exploration, but if Sina still goes past the portal thinking, want to display advertising to achieve micro-blogging profits, then Weibo is far from real commercialization.

When it comes to the commercialization of microblogs, Liu also said, "First, there is no precedent to follow, we need to dig ourselves, second, the need for a market education process, advertisers are not so high acceptance degree." But he still thinks, "the market pays more attention to the social electric quotient or O2O, Sina already is the domestic to go the front." ”