The commercialization paradox of Sina Weibo

Because of the next step in the micro-blogging industry, I have been trying to explore the relationship between the Big V and Sina Weibo. Zennai wait until fire fire has not fire, the Barbarians began to reconsider, open back to cure, Laopan in CCTV talk Big V mind, still haven't written, but this thing but also have to say.

"You hurt me, but a smile, you love the greedy I love cowardice ..." Ying this first "a smile", perhaps the current Big V and Sina Weibo relationship, this kind of concomitant, aloof ambiguous relationship, now with the relevant departments launched the crackdown on online rumors, finally let some big V of the truth in the world.

Once upon a time, Big V also played the role of "white warrior", passing out some positive energy. But this is the other side of the sea calm, a number of micro-broad blatant speculations, network rumors rampant, true and false information difficult to distinguish.

This is a dilemma for Sina: in the process of the rise of Sina Weibo, these third-party microblogging marketing organizations have played an important role, at the same time, many institutions make their profits, but Sina has received very little. The excessive commercialization of some microblogging marketing organizations has even seriously undermined the ecology of Weibo.

After 4 years of Sina Weibo, the achievement of its "Big V" strategy and its obsession with it, how will the next step go? Is the relationship between Big V and platform possible benign evolution?

The Weibo changed by Big V

There are people in the lake, the same applies Umebo.

One day in 2010, when you registered for Sina Weibo, can't wait to ask friends or colleagues around, you find that there are some interesting things on Weibo, such as celebrity celebrities who are interested in, some funny jokes and the soul of the province to save the heart chicken soup and so on, because of various reasons, you pay attention to them, Has made Sina Weibo, and has made these large marketing tools, one of its myriad fans.

In fact, Sina Weibo uses these grassroots reds and celebrity resources to gather popularity and give the initial say, this should be a good start, but unfortunately this is only one aspect of the matter.

Microblogging marketing as the main business model in Sina Weibo provides fertile ground for the initiation and vigorous growth. At present, most of the microblogging marketing is relatively simple, that is, to find large V-paid soft advertising or hard advertising.

Based on this, the star public know Big V a forwarding of income at every turn tens of thousands of dollars to 100,000, grassroots large in the forwarding of thousands of more are everywhere. And this top 100 popular popular grassroots large size actually for several major micro-blog Marketing Group Control, a popular account for the annual revenue can reach millions or even tens of thousands. A source said, 2011, a 3 million fans of the grassroots large, forwarding a micro-blog offer up to 50,000 yuan, 2011 only a "micro-blog Comedy List" of the annual profit is 15 million yuan.

Based on this simple and effective ecological model, the Big V themselves are also completing the upgrade and transmutation, from stars to grassroots reds, and then to the hand, and constantly adapt and meet the needs of the marketing market. In the process, Sina's microblog operating platform was sidelined. At the same time, the pace of commercialization of Sina's own microblog was still slow, and it was not until 2011 that Chao was the first to put forward six commercial approaches, including interactive precision ads, social games, and so on, but this seems to have missed the Weibo golden period.

As a result, the fact is that, without a clear commercial implementation plan, Sina Weibo began to the Big V management of the fold.

March 2012, Sina wide range of micro-bo zombie Powder clean-up, the goal is the grassroots large, after the "sweep", the grassroots large drop in the powder rate of more than 10%, the number is as high as 30% to 40%; in April, Sina announced that the grassroots of the large size of the advertising to completely eliminate; and then May, "Micro blog Comedy List", "Global Classics" such as a part of the grassroots large by Sina for some time the ban, the reason is the content of plagiarism. December, Sina again strengthen the management, to those who have not yet become micro-task cooperation account of the grassroots large, prohibit the forwarding of Taobao and other external links, which makes many grassroots large loss of a lot of forwarding advertising business opportunities.

But still, the year before last that did not know how many barrels of gold Big V, then began to sleeves turn, looking for the next target platform. In the process of commercialization of micro-blogging, Sina is destined to leave only a "loss to make a yell" reputation. The folk even spread the micro-blog marketing agencies to make a pot full of profit, such as Sina Platform for Micro-BO marketing organization made a wedding dress.

The ruin of commercialization

Sina Weibo's position as a platform is embarrassing compared with the comfortable state of Big V.

Over the past two years, Sina has invested 280 million of billions of dollars in Sina Weibo, which has lost less than $66 million trillion in revenues in 2012. Moreover, of these, 77% of the revenue from advertising, the amount of more than 50 million dollars, the so-called value-added services not only the way the performance of a single, such as the lack of innovation in membership services, and contribute very little.

Based on this, while tightening the Big V management, Sina Weibo has also begun to explore many commercial models.

On the one hand, Sina Weibo began to intervene in the micro-Bo marketing market, to the platform of the force to grab Big V and Weibo marketing agencies.

This year, Sina Weibo launched the marketing products "Fan Tong", mainly for the day cat and Taobao sellers to help them promote the shop based on social networks. Before this, Sina Weibo also has another for the electric business marketing product "The message Pass"-Buys, the electric business enterprise may each day directional for the fan to push two letters, thus achieves the commodity marketing, the brand promotion goal. But in the end.

But at present, Sina Weibo to fan-run advertising system has not been a large area of promotion, only through the advertising authority to some users to send letters. "Fan Tong" and "news" the two products of the market reaction is not small.

Another product "micro-task" is directly directed at the Big V and marketing agencies. Based on this, Sina's intention to the grassroots large-scale unified incorporation to the micro-mission platform, paid to publish or forward business information must be through micro-task, Sina Weibo charge 30% of the platform use fee. On the face of it, it seems that Sina Weibo has found a symbiotic pattern with large marketing, but in practice the latter is not buying it.

On the other hand, in order to get rid of a single business model based on display advertising, Sina has also acted frequently on platform-level product development. For example, the depth of the business implant, in the feed stream to the user implanted in the Pagecard products push ads, and then, for example, Alibaba investment, based on data mining to the user page to push Taobao product shopping guide ads.

Although these innovations claim to be based on accurate data mining techniques, the experience feedback from the product does not seem to have worked. One notable detail is the enthusiastic discussion on how to block these ads on Weibo and on the forums.

It is not difficult to see that Sina Weibo applies the traditional portal advertising model is not persistent and trend, even Cao Chao himself admits: "The portal business and micro Bo exist for customers like" but Sina Weibo lacks the commercial value of the product design concept, such as "micro-territory", "micro-game", "micro-payment" and so on still display advertising system , "intelligent sorting", a series of commercial products not only the effect is not up to expectations, but also caused widespread resentment of many users.

There are statistics, Sina explore the commercialization of micro-blog Road, 3 years of time launched dozens of products, but whether it is micro-topic, or micro-live, micro-public, micro-games, micro-search, micro-group, micro-bar, micro-magazine ... Effect is not obvious. and similar to these products on the attempt, no one is leading to "Sina microblogging activity decline" one of the reasons.

At the moment, this heavy reliance on Big V mode has become the biggest obstacle to Sina's commercialization, which seems to be an embarrassing paradox-the result of commercial exploration is that it hurts the basis of commercialization. If this paradox is not resolved, not only will Sina Weibo's commercialization path be long gone, the damage to its platform will be even more lethal. Sina June if not painful determined to overhaul the operation strategy, in the case of continued decline in activity, will continue to be micro-letter and other new killers eat.