Sina Weibo relies on gossip "bo bit"

If the news that two industries are going to buy shares and mergers is viewed as "gossip" in the entertainment industry, then recent Sina Weibo is like a girl who haunts the nightclub, Zooey by the media and the billionaire's second generation. Chao will give up the CEO of the post and hand Alibaba is now the hottest "gossip" one.

Although this is only a rumor, but smoke, there must be a realistic basis, it represents a certain psychological expectations. Sina Weibo is plagued by its huge user base and the appalling reality of income, and the rise of its strong rival, micro-credit.

In the habit of doing "copycat" in China's internet industry, the foreign originator of products often will eventually affect the domestic imitators. Twitter, the US originator of Sina Weibo, has been less profitable in the past two years, which in turn has affected the capital market's valuation of Sina Weibo, leading to a drop in Sina's share price from hundreds to 40 of dollars.

The plight of Twitter and Sina Weibo represents a common challenge for social media products. Although both were started from desktop products, but it is undeniable that it is the popularity of smart phones, the Twitter-like products to bring far more than traditional media timeliness and the sense of the scene, but also brought a large number of users to kill debris time, and thus changed people's reading habits, divided the traditional media attention resources. Based on the strong growth of the "attention market", Twitter products have gained the favor of the capital market. Because in the previous law, attention and advertising revenue have a positive correlation.

But in the age of mobile internet, this rule does not seem to have come into effect at present. Baidu CEO Robin Li, in June this year, proposed "braking theory", pointing out that advertising on the mobile internet is not yet a good way, because the device screen is small, people do not expect the time of debris, so advertising can not achieve the size of attention to match the income. This prediction accurately hits the soft underbelly of Twitter-like products. Even for higher-priced Facebook, it faces the prospect of a massive migration of users to the mobile Internet, which is affecting revenue expectations.

Objectively speaking, Weibo does satisfy people's basic need for instant communication, and may even achieve the importance of "protocol level" (that is, microblogging as an infrastructure into the Internet platform, like e-mail as a standardized function).

But don't forget, the user size, become the infrastructure, are not necessarily a prerequisite for profitability. e-Mail as the first to be standardized also long occupied the Internet first service crown of products, no big companies from it directly profit. Both Microsoft and Google are heavily involved in email because it can solidify the user account system and provide access to their cloud computing, search and other businesses.

Yes, it's the entrance.

Large-scale services, must have a access to profitable services, which can guarantee from the scale to the income of the chain of the closed loop. There is no such chain between Sina Weibo and the parent company Sina, and it is even eroding the revenues of traditional news portals. In April 2011, when the microblogging enabled the independent domain name, Google trends data has shown that Sina Weibo has surpassed the traditional portal Sohu, NetEase, is fast approaching Tencent and Sina's own portal. Even Mr. Chao himself admits that Weibo has a gnawing effect on the advertising business of traditional portals.

Can not realize the value of the original service, Sina Weibo in the product development overlap bottlenecks. The desktop side of the V5 version of the launch is a curse sound, unintelligible intelligent sorting function for the future advertising function is paved, but because of very immature data analysis and recommendation technology by a large number of users resistance. and the Micro-blog page as always confused, as well as Sina's official on the open platform with the competition of third parties, all of its so-called "micro-Bo Ecological Circle" There is a heart of doubt.

In this context, Peng Shaobin was replaced by Wang Gaofei to confirm the speculation that Sina will make a big adjustment because of the weak development of Weibo. Since can replace the general manager of the Division, then a COO to the CEO, of course, is not impossible.

What's more, Sina's past performance has left the impression that "being adept at the capital level is weaker than the product level optimization". This is Sina constantly denied that all kinds of gossip has been lingering inherent factors.

However, the media focus on "a wave of Love", mostly out of a look beautiful but actually not reliable matching reason: Sina has a huge user and SNS network, Alibaba's electricity trader needs the traffic entrance. Sina to become a realization, the electric business is the best way. Since you two are so complementary, is it not the right thing to cooperate?

Capital cooperation between companies is not as simple as the logic of street tellers, who have their own genes.

Alibaba's gene is to do the platform rather than its own initiative to intervene in front-end services. Since Taobao merchants on Sina Weibo has established a preliminary recommendation, guidance system, Ali why superfluous to buy them? What's more, Weibo as the media platform's greatest value lies in its credibility, if Ali in order to give his own electric conductivity to buy it, who dare to buy things on it? Shopping malls in the free distribution of leaflets and no one wants to, the newspaper ads to invest a large sums of money still queued to vote, is out of this truth.

In the final analysis, Weibo in the end how to profit, who are in the heart novices. The various street news around Sina Weibo is far from being appeased by the official rumor, but will continue to ferment and feed back to the boping on the platform.