Sina launched a revamped version of its news portal yesterday. The obvious difference is the search box, with Weibo search as the default option, featured on top of the homepage.
Weibo users now can log into on the news service with Weibo accounts, which, according to Sina staff, is to channel Weibo users who didn’t read news from Sina. “Mobile, Local, Social and Personal” was the internal target for the new version, according to the same insider. Local and Social are to expand the realm and gain more users while Personal is based on Weibo ID.
To take better advantage of Weibo, ads on the new portal become more interactive. All the ads are accompanied with advertisers’ enterprise Weibo ID and linked to Weibo. Users also can follow advertisers’ Weibo accounts directly at the display ads or share the ads to their followers. It is expected it could bring more “social” values to advertisers.