Sina Weibo is growing fast in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It currently has over 50 million users and is expecting to hit 100 million by the end of 2011.
Gaofei Wang, Vice President of Sina Weibo shared with Mobile World Live in an Interview on its growth phase and briefly on its monetization plan.
Weibo first started out as a media outlet where information sharing was the core activity. As more users joined, Weibo slowly became more community oriented. Unlike Twitter, Weibo supports conversations through threaded comments, which gradually creates a highly interactive community. A single Weibo could generate hundreds of comments and shares. Weibo seems to have integrated the best of Facebook and Twitter.
The Chinese population loves it. Even the Chinese government is into micro-blogging. The police department in Beijing uses Weibo as a means to connect with the public. The respond has been great so far. People were actively discussing and spreading news through the Chinese micro-blog. Beside threaded conversations, I believe there are a couple more things that Twitter could also learn from its China rival.
Weibo’s next step seemed similar to Facebook’s. Wang said that Weibo had provided an open platform that welcomes developers to create applications on top of its service. The developer community in China isn’t as robust as compared to America. Sina understood that developers in China are usually freelancers and face challenges to commit themselves to building applications for Weibo. To tackle this problem, Sina launched a special fund to support developers’ cost. Unlike iTunes or Facebook, Sina currently doesn’t have a concrete revenue model for its developers. It is unlikely for developers to create applications without any financial motivation. Thus, the special fund was created to spur interest within the developer’s community.
With a healthy growth rate and community, monetization was definitely part of Weibo’s plan. Wang said that Weibo is looking to make money through advertising and partnership. It wasn’t revealed how ads would be displayed on Weibo but we’re hoping to see a breakthrough or at least something different from Twitter’s Promoted Tweets.
On partnership, Sina Weibo will work with telecom operators like China Mobile, China Unicorn and China Telecom on a shared revenue system. Wang believed that Sina Weibo would improve user connectivity and usage within the Telecom industry. Mobile markers were also within their partnership list. The micro-blog could be pre-installed in phones. This, as Wang believed, would provide extra competitive edge for the mobile makers. It wasn’t revealed how revenue will be shared with mobile makers. (Side note to iPhone users: Sina Weibo is available in the Appstore). Following Twitter’s footstep, another possible revenue stream that wasn’t stated could be to provide data to search engine like Baidu or Google.
But for now, Sina Weibo is currently focused on providing the best user experience to its users. Monetization is secondary.
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