Sina Weibo's "cramming" commercialization may cause indigestion

Recently, Sina Weibo has been upgraded. Reporters noticed that the new version includes card-style page display and new features such as "Discover". The page design is much simpler than before, and some details have been improved to a certain extent. However, many users still complained to reporters that they are not used to it. "The card-style grid is like QQ space, and it feels like there are more and more embedded ads!" "Almost all the templates after the revision are charged. Sina Weibo pays more and more attention to economic benefits!"

Sina Weibo, which was launched five years ago and went public this year, has 69.7 million daily active users and 156 million monthly active users, but it still cannot get rid of revenue losses. Sina's second quarter financial report this year showed that Sina Weibo's revenue reached US$77.3 million, a year-on-year increase of 105%, but it still lost US$15.4 million.

The revision of Sina Weibo also highlights its exploration on the road to commercialization. In addition to the newly added "Discover", IT Times also found that Sina Weibo placed the "Game" sub-column in the same weight position as "Discover", which shows that games based on interest-based social networking will also be another major focus of Sina Weibo in the future. However, can this "cramming" commercialization behavior have an impact on Sina Weibo's revenue in the short term? Or what we should ask is, what should Sina Weibo do next? What problems does it have now?

Wishful thinking

Sina Weibo has always been stuck in the awkward situation of "good reviews but not good sales". Sina has invested a lot in the Weibo business. As the leading social network in China, Sina Weibo has never found a suitable business model since its launch in 2009 despite its rich content. Not only that, the Weibo business has also dragged down the performance of Sina as a whole.

According to an insider of Sina, the stubborn problems of Sina Weibo had long attracted the attention of the group. At the end of 2012, Sina implemented a structural adjustment, dividing it into two major sections, portal and Weibo, with Cao Guowei personally in charge of Weibo. As the focus of the structural adjustment, Weibo is responsible for the second entrepreneurial mission of the entire Sina, which can be said to be "under great pressure."

Although Weibo has not made much money for Sina since its launch, the platform has a lot of Taobao customers and e-commerce marketing, and Dangdang.com, JD.com, Xiaomi mobile phones, LeTV boxes, etc. have all benefited from the platform. This embarrassment of "making wedding clothes for others" also became the reason for joining hands with Alibaba.

In April last year, Alibaba Group invested USD 586 million in Sina Weibo, acquiring about 18% of the latter's shares. At that time, according to reporters, after this cooperation, the two parties will carry out in-depth cooperation in the fields of user account interconnection, data exchange, online payment, network marketing, etc., and explore the social e-commerce model based on the effective interaction between hundreds of millions of Weibo users and hundreds of millions of consumers on Alibaba's e-commerce platform.

For Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, the social networking segment has never been successful. From the early Yahoo relationship to Yitao Discovery, nothing has worked. However, by forming a strategic alliance with Sina, Alibaba opened up the road between Weibo and Taobao in a timely manner, which also added fuel to the subsequent IPO.

Compared with other major portals, Sina did not have any impressive products before. This changed after Weibo was launched. However, Weibo has huge traffic, but how to bring profits is a problem for Sina. Before the marriage with Alibaba, Cao Guowei determined the core strategy of "mobile first", divided Sina into two major sections: portal and Weibo, and personally took charge of Sina Weibo. After the marriage with Alibaba, Cao Guowei once said that all Internet companies have a lot of data, and Alibaba's consumer products need to be advertised. Exchanging data with social media such as Sina Weibo can achieve precise delivery without affecting user experience.

At that time, some people believed that Alibaba's involvement would allow Sina Weibo to further accelerate its commercialization. First, Taobao and Sina Weibo accounts are interconnected, and the cost of user registration becomes lower; second, the display of Taobao products on Weibo will help users better understand the characteristics of products, increase the possibility of purchase, and greatly reduce the cost of logging in and switching between the two platforms; third, the Taobao version of Weibo can help sellers operate the Wangpu account and Weibo account in one stop by adding a Weibo module to the Wangpu background, thereby improving the management efficiency of social marketing. What is more imaginative is that with the advancement of cooperation, Sina Weibo and Alibaba are working together to create an unprecedented Internet super account system, and then create a powerful user virtual life platform.

The accelerating pace of commercialization and the “three mountains”

In the past six months, Sina Weibo has made frequent commercial moves, and changes have arisen as a result.

In June this year, Sina Weibo launched its first mobile game, "Weibo Kicks Football". Zheng Wei, deputy general manager of Sina Weibo, believes that Weibo's entry into the mobile game market will help increase its appeal to young users. In recent years, mobile games have been developing rapidly and are believed to have a huge market size of hundreds of billions. Games based on social circles are considered to be the fastest way to monetize, which is naturally what Sina Weibo values.

Subsequently, Weibo launched reviews of food, travel, books and other products, as well as payment functions, providing personal transactions, collection of payments and other functions closely related to life, and entered the field of life services.

After the new version, Weibo also launched the function of users rewarding self-media, which is a strong overlap with Weibo's payment function. Some industry analysts believe that this also heralds the arrival of the era of paid reading on Weibo.

Data shows that in the past four months, the income of self-media users on the Weibo platform through Weibo advertising and commercial activities has reached nearly 3.5 million. In just two months of the public beta of reward and paid reading, more than 30,000 people have rewarded on it, and the total amount of paid subscriptions has exceeded 1.5 million. However, Sina Weibo is based on strong media attributes, and the "cramming" commercialization will not make much difference to revenue in the short term. On the contrary, some uncomfortable reactions will soon be reflected.

First, after Alibaba invested in Sina, the advertising information on Sina Weibo changed. After browsing Weibo, in addition to the information that users are interested in, embedded advertising information and some sellers' product information are also flooded. With the precise arrival of precision advertising marketing technology, recommended ads based on user usage habits are also generated. For example, if you search for the keyword "condoms" on Taobao, then when you open Weibo again, all the recommended ads are about condoms. This is very unpleasant and embarrassing for those who go to Taobao at night and browse Weibo at work during the day.

Secondly, Sina Weibo has redundant information. When WeChat users, who are based on their acquaintance circles, complain that their friend circles are moving more and more towards Weibo, Weibo has become synonymous with "big groceries". All kinds of information, hundreds or even thousands of unread messages will come in a short time, and users can swipe the screen. However, such redundant information is complicated and makes it easy for users to miss important messages and get aesthetic fatigue during the browsing process.

Of course, after this revision, Sina Weibo is more willing to guide users to collect hot information based on their interest circles, but the real guidance effect remains to be seen. Perhaps in the end, it will guide users to consume, which will bring further damage to the user experience.

Third, compared with other social products, Sina Weibo is no longer as popular as it was in 2011. Nowadays, there are fewer and fewer people around us who insist on posting on Weibo every day. With the rise of WeChat as a social platform, the loss of active Weibo users has become an indisputable fact. More people just regard Weibo as an information platform. After all, Weibo's fundamental attributes are still media.

After the revision, Weibo launched the user reward for self-media. In this regard, Lin Shuiyang, deputy general manager of Sina Weibo, said that more self-media people will be supported, hoping that practitioners in this industry can support themselves and make a healthy development of the entire industry. He compared it to saying that just like there are many people selling goods on Taobao, he hopes that there will be people selling a lot of words on Weibo, which is also entrepreneurship.

However, is it really that easy to cultivate users' paid reading habits in a short period of time? This will definitely take a long time and process. In today's era of information explosion, free information has become a general trend. Problems such as piracy are still a headache for the digital copyright industry. How confident are we about paid reading on Weibo?

In addition, regarding the data value (such as data mining, user behavior data analysis, etc.) that Sina Weibo has proposed, Hong Bo, a well-known Internet commentator, once said to the media, "Sina's search capabilities are very poor, and it was outsourced to others in the end. It also has no data mining capabilities. In terms of commercial exploration, it can only do some superficial things, such as pasting advertisements and recommended content instead of what users need. In other words, the more commercial efforts, the greater the harm to users." Regarding the future direction of Sina Weibo, financial columnist Xin Haiguang believes that the positive value of Weibo should be recognized, and this positive value will continue to play a positive role in the social process of China in the future . "These positive social values ​​embodied by Weibo are also the key to determining the future development of Weibo. As for the financial value added due to Alibaba's involvement, it is just icing on the cake."

An analyst once pointed out to a reporter that the primary issue of Ali's investment in Sina Weibo is who will be the boss. Internet commentator Wei Wuhui believes that Ali's investment in Sina will make Sina Weibo go the closed way, and Sina's independence as a media will be damaged. However, he later said in an article that "Weibo has long since put down its grand and useless airs of 'changing China' and has begun to slowly step into the track that a commercial company should take." "After all, it still has a foundation of 60 million daily active users, and there is still room for improvement after listing."

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.