Weibo ends 2014 with slow but steady growth, now has 176 million monthly active users

Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social network, continues to grow – albeit slowly. Weibo ended 2014 with 175.7 million monthly active users (MAUs), which is up 36 percent year-on-year, and up 5.2 percent from Q3 to Q4.

Although many have talked about WeChat making Weibo irrelevant, it seems that Weibo is standing its ground against the hugely popular messaging app (WeChat is close to 500 million MAUs) despite a number of areas of overlap between the two social networks.

Weibo’s newest data, released overnight as part of the company’s Q4 2014 earnings report, also shows that daily active users (DAUs) are moving upwards slowly. Weibo now has 80.6 million DAUs. As always with Weibo, there are concerns about how many of those users are humans or spambots.

So is Weibo, which started in 2009 and received US$586 million in investment from Alibaba in 2013, making any money after five years of operations? Nope. Throughout the whole of 2014, Weibo made $334.2 million in revenue (up 77 percent from 2013’s tally), but that translated into a net loss of US$63.4 million, which is greater than its losses in 2013.

The full Weibo Q4 earnings report is here.