Sina to Invest Heavily in Its Microblog

China’s largest portal website Sina has highlighted its dedication to Sina Weibo (its microblog), reaffirming the microblog’s pivotal role in China’s Internet industry.

Since Twitter is blocked in China, Sina Weibo and two other microblogs owned by Tencent and Sohu are gaining popularity in the country.

However, the recent pro-democratic waves in Middle East have caused China to tighten its Internet censorship in the last two weeks. The Chinese authority is concerned that news of the democratic rallies will spread and influence Chinese through the Internet. In fact, it already has.

After an anonymous user appealed on Feb 19 for democratic rallies in China, Sina Microblog temporarily closed a function that allowed users to repost other users’ comments. Users also experienced periodic downtime to search on Sina Microblog, typically on Egypt related queries. On top of all these, Internet users who attempted to publish the ideas of democratic rallies found their user accounts temporarily locked.

These developments have drawn attention to the risks faced by Internet companies running social networking service in China. Despite the government’s pressure on social networking site in China, Sina went ahead to announce its plan to invest heavily in its microblog this year.

Sina Weibo’s CEO, Charles Chao said that Sina plans to at least double the number of the employees in the Microblog department from the current 600 people to 1,200. Marketing expense is also likely to increase as the Chinese microblog seeks to gain more users this year. Its aggressive user adoption campaign would probably have a negative impact on Sina Group’s overall profitability in the short run.

In the last 4 months, the number of Sina Weibo users has doubled to 100 million. Although this figure is only equivalent to half of Twitter’s global users, it makes Sina Weibo the largest microblog service in China.

Chao said that Sina would only monetize the microblog service after it has gained true dominance in the country. “We may initiate our commercial test in the second half of this year, but this is not our priority,” he said.

Via iResearch