After months of frustration for investors, Sina (Nasdaq: SINA) has finally laid out a detailed plan for how it will earn money from Weibo, with company executives forecasting the highly popular but unprofitable microblogging service will produce “meaningful” money by the second half of this year. Investors clearly liked what they heard, bidding up Sina’s shares by 12 percent in New York trading the day after CEO Charles Chao made his comments on a conference call to discuss Sina’s otherwise unimpressive fourth-quarter results. (English article; results announcement) I’ve had a glance at the plan, and it looks like a mixed bag of some things that are likely to work and some that probably won’t. In the first category, the most promising part is Sina’s plan to sign up enterprise customers and launch an ad display system on Weibo, which now boasts more than 250 million users. (English article) These 2 approaches look smart because they both target business customers, who are probably quite happy to pay big bucks for a chance to reach Weibo’s millions of users. Less interesting are Sina’s plans to roll out a growing number of paid services for Weibo users, including paid gaming services. In one of its few previously announced Weibo monetization initiatives, Sina said in January it would offer a premium version of Weibo for users who wanted to pay for extras like getting SMS mobile phone notifications when they received new posts to their accounts. (previous post) That announcement was greeted with mostly yawns, as everyone, myself included, knows it’s very difficult to get people to start paying for services that they’ve previous gotten for free — especially the big majority of Weibo users who are under 30 and don’t necessarily have lots of cash to spend. Of course, execution will be key in all of this, as it’s easy to say you’re going to target enterprise customers but not necessarily as easy to create products that those customers will want. Facebook has been quite successful at making this transition, though the road has been less smooth for Twitter, the global microblogging giant. In China the story is the same, with Baidu (Nasaq: BIDU) a clear leader at monetizing the huge traffic that flows through its search engine while local Facebook equivalent Renren (NYSE: RENN) has had more difficulty. Given Sina’s long history and relatively strong record at executing this kind of strategy, I would say its chances of making some significant money from Weibo by the end of this year are good. If that happens, I would look for an IPO of this high-profile unit as soon as mid-2013.
Bottom line: Sina’s plans to target corporate customers to monetize its Weibo service looks like a smart move, though plans to get money from ordinary users look more problematic.
Related postings 相关文章:
◙ Sina Tests Weibo Demand With Paid Offering 新浪试水微博增值收费服务
◙ Twitter Eyeing China? Twitter想进中国？
◙ Sina’s Weibo Suffers New Setback With Lawsuit 吉林市驻京办可能起诉新浪微博
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DHGate and group buying site Groupon.cn, which is no relation to US industry leader Groupon. Let’s take a look at 56.com first. (
