Sina Weibo making more money than ever, ad revenue up 125%

Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social network, posted more big gains in Sina‘s (NASDAQ:SINA) Q3 2013 report (article in Chinese). Weibo advertising revenue skyrocketed 125 percent on last year to $43.7 million, up 46 percent from $30 million last quarter. Weibo’s non-advertising revenue also saw a 121 percent increase to $9.7 million from online games and premium membership fees.

Sina as a whole posted $25.4 million in profit and $184.6 million in revenue during the third quarter, up a hefty 157 percent and 21 percent year-on-year, respectively. $151.6 million of that revenue came from advertising, which made up a slightly bigger slice of the pie with a 26 percent increase.

Altogether, Weibo accounts for 29 percent of Sina’s total net revenue.

Analysts attributed (article in Chinese) Sina’s strong performance to two factors: Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which owns an 18 percent stake in Sina, funneling companies to advertise on Sina Weibo, and Twitter’s successful IPO, which boosted advertiser and investor confidence.

Sina has been avidly trying out new ways to maximize profits on Weibo. Late last month, it started allowing brands and celebrities to offer subscriptions for followers, which Sina takes a cut of. The company also recently revealed it has opened up its marketing services (article in Chinese) for companies. Some of the new features include:

• Private letters that can be sent to subscribers
• Customizable auto-reply for companies receiving more messages than they can handle
• A new marketing API that comes with real-time analytics and public opinion monitoring
• Customizable page header and background on the company’s Weibo page
• Better integration for embedding Weibo into 3rd-party native apps

According to SeekingAlpha, Weibo expects to fare even better in Q4 2013 with up to $194 million in revenue, of which $162 million will come from ads.

(Source: Techweb)

(Editing by Steven Millward)