Sina Corp. Vice President Wang Gaofei said the company still requires a certain scale of users before its popular microblogging website can be monetized.
Chinese internet portal Sina Corp. (Nasdaq: SINA) will continue to expand its user base as its top priority in 2012, and will not attempt to monetize Sina Weibo, the largest microblog platform in China, according to company Vice President Wang Gaofei.
Without a certain scale, even if Weibo can make money in the short term, its profit-making capability is unsustainable, Wang said at a forum in Beijing on January 8.
Advertisements remain a major source of future revenue for Weibo, which will look to the strategy developed by Facebook to deliver precise ads to target consumers on the strength of social networking. In addition to this, Weibo will seek growth from value-added services, such as open-ended games on the platform, said Wang.
Sina is no longer an Internet company, but a media firm existing in the form of Internet, said Wang.
Nearly 80,000 firms and 18,000 government departments have so far opened their accounts on Weibo. Besides, as of October 2010, 9,823 media outlets have made their voice via Weibo, said Wang.
According to Sina data, Weibo, launched in August 2009, had 250 million registered users by the end of 2011, with new users growing at 20 million per month over the past year. Subscribers stay on Weibo for about 60 minutes on average per day and over 50 percent of users log onto microblogs via mobile phones.
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