The future of Sina Weibo: media or social

Now, on Sina Weibo, there have been a number of commercial roads. Alibaba's recent share of the rumors of Sina Weibo, but also added to Sina Weibo future path of unlimited speculation.

What is the future of Sina Weibo's business model? Sina CEO Charles Chao has listed six major profit points: advertising, gaming, search, wireless value-added, e-commerce and content charges. It is true that Sina Weibo can be done concurrently, but there is no core competition point, but Sina does not have a clear goal, like the vegetable market, messy.

The author believes that Sina can only choose two leading roads, one for the media, and two for social. Both are difficult to reconcile. There are many places in the media and on the social surface, but they cannot be combined in nature. Media direction needs advertising + search products, social direction needs advertising +im products. Moreover, if Sina cannot make up the short board of technology gene and product manager, want to develop to become the platform company of Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, it is impossible, will still stop in the media, not platform eventually.

At present, Sina Weibo can be in the media and social swing and temptation, but need to clear its own user platform unique theme attributes. Once the direction is set, start focusing, focusing, digging, and dying on the product (not the sale).

The following is the author's vision for Sina Weibo, the possibility of commercialization in two different ways:

Media Road

Sina Weibo started off with media outlets--from media aggregation platforms. This road is most consistent with Sina's own media genes and resource endowments. The media corresponding platform is the advertising-oriented model. Among them, the display advertisement is too simple, and the imagination is limited. The capital market is not excited about this. What Sina needs is a precise advertising model, which needs to be based on a large data mining analysis, which involves the judgment of user behavior and user preferences. Sina Weibo needs to establish accurate flow navigation and advertising display.

Can be divided into Sina Weibo easy to make quick money: Display advertising, marketing activities, social game sharing, wireless value-added services. Hard to earn slow money: Interactive precision advertising, digital content charges, search, E-commerce platform.

Quick money easy to earn and easy to dig up the potential suddenly, growth rate curve belongs to step on the stagnation type. Take the game, the game is China's largest internet, Tencent, Sohu and NetEase's largest proportion of revenue is not a game, but Sina did not play their own games. If Sina wants to divide more money in the game, it is easy to encounter the bottleneck in the media mode, its conversion rate is not higher than the vertical game website. Even the conversion rate of E-commerce will be more optimistic than the game.

In terms of slow money, what Sina can do is:

Interactive precision Advertising technology. This is one of the pearl of the global Internet crown, its difficulty is self-evident. If the division of Gender, geography, income and so on is to achieve "accurate" degree, that is too elementary. True precision to be able to accurately grasp the user behavior psychology, and guess you like. The field is endless.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu and Ali are all searching in this area. Sina in this respect is not the leading, if its own development is not smooth, the acquisition is one of the last resort, good yes and the media is too expensive, the real technical content of SMEs can be considered direction. As to whether Ali can bring the technology upgrade to Sina, depends on the depth of cooperation between the two sides to what extent.

Search. This is actually Sina Weibo one of the breakthroughs, even 360 dare to try, Sina Weibo should also be brave to bright sword. and search technology, Alibaba could have been very good for Sina support. Because Taobao's search volume is estimated to enter the top three, after Baidu and Google China. Sina insiders said, Sina Weibo daily search requests, and search engine put together, can also compete for the top five. And this is Sina Weibo's search function has not been the focus of creating and many restrictions on the situation. As long as a slight upgrade, improve the search experience, the search volume will be significantly improved. This depends on Ali and micro-BO cooperation can talk about the extent, whether Ken will have no reservations to five years groping search tool to give Sina Weibo.

Since Sina casually on Weibo to get a search in the site search box has so natural flow, imagine, if Sina Weibo can open the search box cooperation, will be more attractive. In fact, Sina Weibo can fully search from one site into several vertical areas of search, such as music, news, and even E-commerce, and then to the general search development.

In short, in the media model-led decision, Sina Weibo in advertising products need to spend the strength does not need to be very large, because the media mode of advertising is relatively limited (many for display), advertisers relatively limited (many for large brands), advertising model relatively simple (by time and location charges). Sina needs to focus more on the aggregation of media content and develop content search products that conform to its own characteristics. In fact, Li pointed out that Baidu is the essence of the media. The media should be so understanding: through the search portal to allow more users to stay on their own platform for a long time, do not go, to provide them with more content. Instead of coming and leaving as soon as possible.

For media-oriented search, users initiate search requests that naturally expose their claims, such as a user searching for a disease that most likely requires treatment. If an advertiser only needs a small number of keywords, this does not require sophisticated mining and matching techniques.

E-commerce platform. Sina should not also do not to build independent e-commerce, still only through advertising, navigation, search and other ways from the E-commerce department to obtain advertising fees and split.

Social Road

Under the social path, Sina should take full advantage of Facebook's approach and have a more direct collision with QQ and micro-letters. Sina Weibo is pushing the new version of the revision, but also to the direction of more social attributes to explore, which has been a lot like the old version of the media interface with the user's aversion, but the new revision does create more advertising bit. Sina Weibo has mastered the user's main attribute data, which is the basis for using Facebook for social platform advertising.

Precision Advertising System. In social mode, the need for precision advertising systems, and the task is more difficult than the media model, larger. Media mode, advertising system can be more use by location and time to charge. and the main lock small thousands of or so large brand advertisers. And in social mode, Sina needs to accommodate more small and medium-sized enterprises, the main number of advertisers can reach hundreds of thousands of, into the click, according to the effect or even a series of sales charges, such as a range of advertising models, and can let business owners like to put the search engine keyword as self-help under the list, to achieve from the brand advertising model to social

In this area of technical challenges, Sina in the short term to see the outside world can come up with a mature plan of hope.

Social IM platform. On the social path, another platform that Sina Weibo needs to develop is to expand the letters function into a social IM platform similar to QQ, micro-mail, etc. across PCs and mobile internet. Sina launched a microblogging client, but also launched a micro-friend, but because of the lack of product manager culture, is still unable to make products can be a confrontation with Tencent degree.

MSN exit the market, in fact, Sina is a good opportunity to expand the market. If this IM client can take advantage of Sina Weibo to the high-end city crowd coverage, instead of MSN in white-collar and urban work crowd status, Micro Bo has the basis of confrontation with QQ. In turn, the mobile internet can also be linked to micro-blogging, make a difference.

It is clear that, under the social path, Sina needs to deal with a greater technical challenge.

Borrow power from Alibaba? Unreliable

It can be expected, Alibaba even if the stake is not likely to dominate Sina Weibo (not to mention the current so-called capital cooperation has been suspended), the cooperation between the two sides can surpass Alibaba and sogou cooperation depth, not optimistic.

In fact, even if there is real progress in capital co-operation, Alibaba's investment is unlikely to change to more and cheaper ad spots on Weibo. For example, the core data, Alibaba's investment wants to exchange Sina Weibo user data to open to it, this is even more unlikely. Therefore, Alibaba will certainly value the financial returns, the price can not expect Alibaba mind fever regardless of the price.

At present, both sides of the power pattern is: Taobao and the cat has nearly 500 million registered users, every day on Taobao platform shopping crowd of hundreds of millions of people, Sina Weibo as a platform, the user size as high as 400 million. According to Sina Weibo insiders revealed that the two sides of the user overlap more than 40%.

Can both parties open up the sharing of these user data, develop a set of accurate control of user behavior models and systems, and even jointly develop search, IM products? The author thinks that the 20% equity investment is not enough to allow both sides to promote the depth of such mutual portals.

If there is no user data open, Local service and O2O can only float on the surface and shallow exploration. As for Ali on Sina Weibo's media pr demand, belong to the sesame said into watermelon.