TechCrunch did an interesting post regarding Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo with comprehensive and general details of both. But what’s the insider’s view? Tencent VP Sun Zhonghui has given us some insightful perspectives during a local media interview lately.
According to Sun, since weibo, microblogging service is still in its infancy, neither Tencent nor other internet businesses are entitled to claim success. Maybe someone (apparently refers to Sina) counted itself as a winner, but it’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who is swimming naked.
There’re two factors when it comes to the success or not of weibo services, (a), what users can get from you; (b), where do you get money from. None of those weibo services in China have found its answer to the second one. And we are not sure if there’s an answer to that. Maybe weibo will eventually become some kind of essential service, will not make money at all.
However, though still in need of a clear business model, weibo is appealing to users and the market competition is fierce and mounting, none of the portals can afford to stop investing into it.
Also, he remarked the reason why Sina Weibo sees higher engagement as compared to Tencent Weibo is that people who actively post message on Sina are mostly in media industry, their social networks are so much wider and intertwined with each other, so their posts enjoy much more comments and responses. Tencent is a late-comer in weibo area with fewer media users, so lacks behind in networking and comments which speaks to engagement.
As of now Tencent Weibo boasts a total of over 233 million users while Sina Weibo claims over 2 million.
“Most people posting on Weibo are in the Media industry” – totally unsubstantiated and untrue. The reason people aren’t posting on Tencent Weibo is because it’s crap. All that said, it is damn hard [but not impossible] to monetize Weibo traffic…
Why is Tencent Weibo crap? Functionally it (not including external ecosystem) is as good, if not better.
Sina VP ‘s reply, “tencent weibo users are mainly from 2nd 0r 3rd tier cities and under the age of 15.”
LOL
And that last sentence, “tencent is a late-comer…?” more like “tencent’s response to the weibo movement was very slow, AND we don’t know how to engage or encourage our 1B users to give tencent weibo a go.”