The commercialization of Sina's microblogging platform is accelerating

Absrtact: Facing 324 million of registered users, the commercialization of Sina Weibo platform is speeding up with high investment and operating costs. Yesterday, Sina chief executive and President Charles Chao revealed at the earnings analysis meeting that at present, in order to promote the commercialization process, Sina

Facing 324 million of registered users, the commercialization of Sina Weibo platform is "speeding up" under high investment and operating costs.

Sina Weibo is setting up and perfecting its infrastructure, such as micro-blogging credit system, micro-blogging payment system and micro-blogging data mining system, in an effort to advance the commercialization process, Sina chief executive and President Charles Chao said yesterday. In addition, Sina also plans to launch in the four quarter to serve the small and medium-sized enterprise and individual user's self-service advertisement system.

"The current commercialization of microblogs will come mainly from advertising, as well as a portion of digital product sales." Chao pointed out that although the commercialization of micro-blogging has been launched, but social media advertising in the domestic still new form, need time for market development, which means that the two-quarter Sina's overall advertising revenue will not be due to the introduction of micro-blog advertising to achieve greater growth.

Earnings showed that in the first quarter of March 31, 2012, the unaudited financial report, Sina's first quarter net revenue of 106.2 million U.S. dollars, the year-on-year increase of 6%; net loss of 13.7 million U.S. dollars, less than the same period last year's net profit of 15 million U.S. dollars.

In fact, although Sina Weibo's ability to become a reality is far from being seen, its spending growth on Sina has been real. Last year, Sina invested about 120 million dollars in personnel, infrastructure and marketing costs, and Sina is continuing to invest 160 million dollars in Weibo this year.

The daily economic news notes that, since last year, Sina's intention to transform from a one-way Twitter model to a two-way Facebook model has been made clear, and since then instant messaging, micro-groups, albums, locations and other functions have been on the line, allowing Sina Weibo's social flavour to begin to become "heavier".

In Sina's view, microblogging ads based on the recommendation engine of social relations and interest maps are more targeted than traditional ads, achieving a shift from traffic purchases to user launches, emphasizing advertising as content, and recommending brand content to potentially interested users through social interest profiles.

In addition, Sina Weibo will launch a commercial open platform in the near future, providing support to developers at the technical and interface levels, together creating the application store of service enterprises to create a benefit-sharing mechanism.

Sina's changes are inspired by Facebook. According to emarketer, a leading US market research firm, global social-network advertising revenue will remain strong in 2012, and global advertisers will spend 7.72 billion of billions of dollars on social-networking ads this year, with only one ad revenue on Facebook expected to reach $5 billion trillion.

In addition to social advertising, in 2012 Sina commercialization of the play and corporate microblogging, which is the industry's most bullish business model.

Chao said the current number of Sina Enterprises Weibo has more than 130,000, the hope that the number of enterprises to reach the end of the year 400,000, based on this, Sina on the one hand to provide data, tools and other value-added services, on the other hand, enterprise Weibo user base and activities will be the future important commercial resources.

It is understood that Facebook has more than 500,000 corporate certification accounts, Facebook relies on providing a variety of services to businesses, 2011 advertising revenue has reached 3.1 billion U.S. dollars, is expected to reach 5 billion U.S. dollars this year.

However, this does not mean that Sina's commercialization process is not challenged. For example, in the third quarter of last year Sina launched the microblogging game platform, so far the user chain growth is not very significant, and Tencent in the game and so on not only has a wealth of operating experience, but also has a Q-coin, Tenpay and other perfect system.

To this end, Sina is trying to build a micro-bo payment system, credit system and data mining system to further improve the commercialization of micro-BO infrastructure. According to the daily economic news, Sina's new payment platform is currently applying for a third-party payment licence.

"The important part of Sina's commercialization also needs to build its own payment system." Senior commentator Cao Yue said that the biggest obstacle to Sina's commercialization was its fragile products and research and development capabilities. Since the establishment of Sina, has been in accordance with the way of strong media revenue, which relies more on the operation rather than research and development capabilities, but also objectively caused by Sina's technical reserves are insufficient. To achieve social 2.0 transformation, whether it is Google or Facebook, or Instagram and other small companies, will be the technology-driven first. Although Sina Weibo has found the right direction to socialize, it is still a long way from real "commercialization".