What is the profit model of Sina opening Weibo?

Weibo is a social networking platform for users to post, comment and pay attention to information through clients, and the number of words for each post is less than 14 words. It started with Twitter launched by evan williams in the United States in 26. Chinese mainland's earliest website providing Weibo service was Fanfan. What really brought Weibo into public view was the Weibo service of Netease, Sina and Tencent, with Sina Weibo as the representative, which was officially opened to the public in October 29. The huge Internet users mean that Sina Weibo has great market value.

Present situation

In p>21, Sina Weibo changed the slogan of "focusing on user experience, not for profit" and instead proposed: "Ask Weibo for advertising revenue." Cao Guowei, CEO of Sina, said in 211 that social games, interactive accurate advertisements, e-commerce platforms, social games, wireless value-added services, real-time search and digital content charging are the six profit models of Sina Weibo. ① At present, the specific operation of these models is still in the exploratory stage.

(1) The traditional advertising profit model

It is the main way to commercialize Weibo industries in China at present. Take Sina Weibo as an example. On April 17th, 212, Sina Weibo advertiser service official and V Weibo "Weibo Advertising" published an advertising quotation, which listed the specific prices of different advertisements. On April 26th, at the 212 Weibo Marketing Conference, Sina launched an open platform for commercial advertising in Weibo. As far as the forms of advertisements are concerned, Sina Weibo mainly includes keyword advertisements, banner advertisements, recommendation advertisements and viral advertisements. Whether logging in to Sina Weibo from a PC or a mobile client, banner advertisements are mainly located at the top of the interface, the top and bottom of the personal interface, and the top and bottom of micro-groups, micro-squares, etc. Recommended advertisements are mainly located on the right side of the user's home page, and there are four categories: book recommendation, movie recommendation, restaurant recommendation and popular product recommendation. These two forms of advertising are limited by their own limitations, for example, the design of Weibo pages is too simple, the interface of mobile terminals is small, and traffic consumption is high. Keyword advertisements are mainly aimed at popular keywords and key topics. After business owners buy these keywords and topics, Sina Weibo binds them. When users search for keywords, the corresponding advertisements will appear on the search page. Sina Weibo also pushes viral advertisements. Specifically, it locks keywords according to the information published by users, forcibly pushes relevant advertisements to specific users, and makes profits by users' clicks on advertisements.

(II) The new advertising profit model

provides value-added services and makes profits through virtual product transactions. First of all, it is the development of membership function. In this respect, Sina Weibo used Tencent's value-added profit model for reference and launched VIP service, namely "Weibo Member" service. As long as the membership is opened, users can enjoy more privileged services, such as dress-up privilege, identity privilege, function privilege, mobile phone privilege and so on. Secondly, the column of "Micro-coins+Games" was launched to collect fees through the game platform. Sina uses Twitter for reference, and the new version of Sina Weibo in 211 has two obvious changes: the game column and the virtual currency-micro-currency. For users, special game roles and functions must be obtained by paying game coins (micro-coins), and the conversion ratio of RMB to micro-coins is 1: 1, so that Sina Weibo can fully tap users' consumption potential by cooperating with third-party software game developers. Whether it is VIP membership service or micro-currency, Sina currently has a mature purchase and payment system.

conduct e-commerce. Weibo should not only be an information publishing platform, but also a sales platform. ② According to the DCCI21 China Internet Weibo and Community Survey Report, e-mail, music and entertainment, search, electronic payment and e-commerce are the most anticipated functions of Sina Weibo users. At present, Sina Weibo's e-commerce mode is mainly "Weibo+e-commerce". Strong user stickiness, high degree of attention and high activity are its unique advantages, which will help to improve the single rate, arrival rate and conversion rate of e-commerce, and provide unique conditions for group buying for users. On March 18th, 211, more than 3, T-shirts with American Apparel collar were snapped up by Weibo fans within 24 hours, and "micro-group" was born as a new word. Sina Weibo and No.1 Store jointly launched the "Weibo Bill Search" business, and at the same time, Sina Weibo APP added "micro group purchase". Sina Weibo's "Weibo+e-commerce" model is also manifested in the joint efforts with e-commerce to carry out product marketing, thus sharing profits. For example, after the online payment service was launched in December 212, Sina Weibo and Xiaomi Technology cooperated to sell mobile phones, and the sales volume reached 5, units in five minutes.

Expanding thinking

(1) Innovation of traditional advertising profit model

Advertising is still one of the main ways for Sina Weibo to make profits at present. I think the following ways are worth considering. On the one hand, Weibo has the function of sharing videos, and it can learn from the practice of Renren.com, a social network, and place advertisements on videos in the station. On the other hand, Sina has star Weibo users, who can be hired to publish some information with links to specific Weibo advertisers, and share them according to the established agreement. In addition, you can also link other websites on Weibo's page, divert some users to other websites, and share the advertising revenue of the linked websites by calculating traffic. Finally, try the combination of games and advertisements, such as cleverly implanting advertisements in the settings of games.

(II) Enlightenment of Twitter commercialization on Sina Weibo's new profit model

1. Coordinate the profit sharing with communication operators. With the arrival of the 4G era, domestic mobile communication has entered a golden period. At present, the login volume of Sina Weibo's mobile phone client exceeds that of PC, so it has brought huge traffic to operators. Wang Jianzhou, chairman of China Mobile, once said that traffic revenue is an important part of China Mobile, and a large part of traffic is brought by Weibo. In addition to traffic, we can learn from the commercialization practice of Twitter, and the two sides can coordinate and share the huge tariffs generated by traffic, SMS and MMS.

2. learn from the experience of Twitter and Baidu search engines, and dig deep into the business opportunities of Weibo's search function. In 21, Twitter announced its cooperation with the social media data analysis company Grip, which sold 5% of Twitter messages for $36, a year or 5% for $6, a year. (3) Sina Weibo can learn from it, handle the relationship between ordinary users and special users, and adopt Baidu's "advertising bidding" mechanism for special users in Weibo. A huge amount of information emerges in Sina Weibo all the time, which is helpful for its real-time search. In addition, we can learn from Twitter to provide customized and practical paid information services for different user groups.

3. Pay attention to the profit model of corporate accounts and promote corporate brands with compensation. First of all, it provides user data for enterprises, which is actually a profitable enterprise account model in Weibo, represented by Twitter in practice. In June, 21, after Twitter acquired the data analysis tool company named Small thought Systems, it started charging business for corporate accounts. Weibo deals with user information, including consumers' demands and purchases of different brands of products, and then sells them directly to enterprises. Weibo is known as "the best cellular marketing position" in business circles, and Sina Weibo can carry out paid brand promotion for enterprises.

Conclusion

No matter how the profit model of Sina Weibo is improved, users are always the core support point of profit. At this point, Sina Weibo has the initial innate conditions. After the successful enclosure in Weibo, it is an urgent problem for Sina Weibo to consider and solve how to make good use of all kinds of profitable resources.