Sina Says Weibo Monetization Dependent on User Growth

Sina CEO Charles Chao

Chinese internet company Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) has just released its second-quarter financial report, with net revenues up 11 percent to 131.6 million. The company’s advertising revenues are up 12 percent over the previous year, despite a difficult advertising market in China.

Sina’s bright spot is — as you might expect — its Weibo microblogging service, which it says has strong growth even with a ‘tightened regulatory environment.’ CEO Charles Chao ran down some key metrics from Weibo in their earnings call:

The total number of registered accounts for Weibo reached 368 million at end of June, up 13.6 percent from 324 million at the end of March. More importantly, the average number of daily active users […] grew by 21 percent from the month of March to the month of June and […] reached 36.5 million. The average number of daily active users as a percentage for the registered account increased to 10 percent in the month of June, as compared to 9 percent in the month of March, a strong indication of increased user activeness for Weibo platform. Among the daily active users, 69 percent used the mobile terminals to access the Weibo in the month of June, as compared to 64 percent in the month of March. [bold is mine]

Regarding the mobile vs PC breakdown of users, he says that about 69 percent access via mobile, with 30 percent of those overlapping onto PC (i.e. 40 percent are ‘pure mobile’). And as we pointed out last week, Sina is certainly nervous about how to successfully monetize mobile users.

Chao also noted on the call that Sina Weibo’s number of enterprise accounts sits at about 200,000 currently.

The company is expecting a third quarter boost as a result of the London Olympics and increased adoption of Weibo advertising. It also says that there are plans to launch Weibo version 5 in that quarter as well, which will bring ‘significant changes’ to profile pages as well as give users the ability to share with closed circles privately, possibly resembling Google Plus in that function.

But Sina is still postured for more of a marathon with Weibo than a sprint, saying that monetization ‘will largely dependent on the scale of its user platform,’ and so it will continue to invest in growing its users and improving user experience.