Popularity of Sina Weibo will soon exceed Twitter

Twitter inspired Sina Weibo. But very soon, popularity of China’s microblog king will surpass its pioneer.

By the end of January, Sina’s top-100 micro-bloggers had 198.2 million followers, increase 16% from previous month. This equals 68% of Twitter. Wallace Cheung, analyst of Credit Suisse expected Sina microblog to exceed Twitter by top 100 bloggers’ followers in the second half of this year.

How about Tencent’s Microblog ?? It has 100 million users, more than double the number of user Sina announced in October, 50 million. However, most industry experts believe in term of usage, Sina is still leading. Sina users are much more active. And it is active user define the value of a social network. So, Sina Weibo is still better.

But how about monetization ?? It seems advertisers are getting more and more interests in placing ads with Sina Weibo, too. Wallace expected Sina’s earning can increase 5% this year due to ad spending on Weibo.