Weibo has been profitable for six consecutive months and has been deeply engaged in verticalization, occupying third-and fourth-tier cities with Internet celebrities and live broadcasts

Since its launch in 2009, Sina Weibo has gone through nearly seven years. Since then, WeChat has come from behind and has grown into the main social tool of China in four to five years. Weibo was once regarded as "declining" and many methods have been used to seek rejuvenation. Now, Weibo is returning to center stage with the help of new trends such as Internet celebrities and live broadcasts.

Original title: Weibo has been profitable for six consecutive months, relying on Internet celebrities and live broadcasts to occupy third-and fourth-tier cities.

Since its launch in 2009, Sina Weibo has been in for nearly seven years. Since then, WeChat has come from behind and has grown into the main social tool of China in four to five years. Weibo was once regarded as "declining" and many methods have been used to seek rejuvenation.

Now, Weibo is returning to center stage with the help of new trends such as Internet celebrities and live broadcasts.

On June 16, Weibo's first "Super Reds Festival" was held in Shanghai, bringing together Wang Sicong, papi sauce and other celebrities. At the same time, Weibo also launched a "2016 Internet Celebrity Ecology White Paper" in conjunction with iResearch. Weibo is telling the market: I am the center of the Internet celebrity era.

A series of data also shows that Weibo has achieved remarkable results in the past year or so. In May, Weibo announced its financial results for the first quarter of this year. Data showed that Weibo's net revenue increased 24% from the same period last year to US$119.3 million, exceeding the company's expected range of US$111 million to US$116 million. Net profit increased by 491% compared with the same period last year. As of the first quarter of this year, profits have been achieved for six consecutive months.

Weibo's results exceeded the expectations of management and almost all Wall Street investment banks. After the earnings report was announced, Morgan Stanley raised its Weibo target price from US$24 to US$30. Morgan Stanley emphasized in its report that compared with other social media, the average value of monthly active Weibo users is seriously underestimated. As indicators such as daily active users and user stay continue to improve, it is believed that the commercialization potential of Weibo platform is huge.

At the same time as the financial report was announced, Weibo also announced that its advertising contract with Alibaba would expire in January 2016. Previously, some analysts believed that Weibo's share price was undervalued, one of the reasons was that Weibo's contract with Ali had many uncertainties.

Facts have proved that Weibo's independent "blood-making" ability is rapidly improving. The financial report shows that non-Ali advertising revenue growth in Q1 this year reached 97%. Alibaba's investment in Weibo increased by 34% in 2015, which is much less than the growth rate of non-Alibaba advertising.

Profit growth in third-and fourth-tier cities

is inseparable from advertising revenue, and advertising revenue is inseparable from the growth in the number and activity of users. In the past year, the number of Weibo users has achieved excessive growth, especially in third-and fourth-tier cities.

Mao Taotao, Weibo's public relations director, told reporters that the popularity of mobile Internet has brought opportunities for Weibo in third-and fourth-tier cities. Industry insiders analyzed that with the rapid spread of 4G networks to cities and rural areas outside key cities, bringing a new base for mobile Internet users, people returning home during the Spring Festival can easily become free "local tweets" on Weibo.

Another reason is that smartphone manufacturers have launched channel sinking strategies-mobile phone brands such as vivo and OPPO have more advantages in channel-dependent third-and fourth-line and rural areas. Weibo has in-depth cooperation with them, which is in line with Weibo. The market rhythm of Weibo echoes.

In the past two years, a number of Internet celebrities have gradually grown up on Weibo who use Weibo as a platform and use e-commerce and advertising as their monetization models. Some of these leading user groups have already had strong personal brand influence and commercial monetization capabilities. Mao Taotao told reporters that the realization of the commercial value of these users on Weibo has played a good role in improving and activating the entire content commercial ecosystem of Weibo.

Internet celebrities publish content on Weibo, increase fans, and then realize commercial monetization through platforms such as Weibo or Taobao. In this process, in addition to integrating into Weibo's content ecosystem, they also grow themselves through Weibo's commercial product system. Influence and enhance their monetization effect.

It can be said that the openness and publicity of Weibo are just in line with the new Internet trend of live broadcasts, Short Video and Internet celebrities. Weibo CEO Wang Gaofei said that Weibo will transform from a real-time information network to an interest Social networks.

Mao Taotao said that Weibo has made some adjustments in its positioning. From its early current political topics and social affairs, it has now expanded more into vertical segments based on interests. Tourism, movies, automobiles, TV, food, etc. are becoming areas where Weibo has made breakthrough progress.

It is precisely for this reason that the original discourse space occupied by current affairs big V on Weibo is being diluted by more small and medium-sized V and self-media in the industry. The overall reading volume of big V is declining, but the growth rate of non-V is also faster. What this change has brought about is the sinking and rejuvenation of users. The scale of Weibo users and young users in third-and fourth-tier cities has increased significantly.

Deeply engaged in vertical industry

response to the trend, Weibo has been constantly adjusting its strategy for more than two years.

In terms of content, Weibo is simultaneously making efforts in Short Video, live broadcasts, and self-media. In November last year, Weibo led by Weibo and focused on Short Video completed a US$200 million Series D financing. On May 20 this year,"One Live Broadcast", a product owned by Technology, was launched. Users can watch the live broadcast with one click on Weibo. Han Kun, chairman of Xixia Technology, said that live broadcast services are very suitable for harvesting on large platforms. Any platform can invite celebrities, but the best platform for celebrities to stay is Weibo, and "live streaming" can also benefit from it.

Live broadcasting has become a new means of creating content. For example, when a major emergency occurs, Weibo users on the scene can post live broadcasts, which is equivalent to a piece of news witnessing the scene. The Weibo live broadcast function has also effectively revitalized the existing beauty and Internet celebrity resources on Weibo.

In the past two years, Weibo has signed contracts with a large number of self-media authors in different industries. In addition, Weibo has also opened headlines and video live broadcast protocols to third parties. Media can use third-party interfaces to synchronize news to Weibo headlines. In terms of videos, media, self-media and hardware manufacturers can access it to synchronize content to Weibo live broadcasts.

On May 24, Weibo announced that it had reached a strategic cooperation with CCTV Sports Channel. The two sides will invest superior resources to strengthen cooperation in products, content, big data and reporting during the Olympics. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of Weibo's industry verticalization.

In 2014, Weibo launched an industry verticalization strategy. So far, the monthly reading volume of 12 industries including celebrities, animation, fashion, film, and finance has exceeded 10 billion. Self-media and Internet celebrities are all important forces on the road to verticalization.

Taking Internet celebrities as an example, Weibo has begun to cooperate with Internet celebrity agencies, artist agencies, and video self-media companies to promote content creators to better use Weibo products, which has enabled Weibo to gain better influence in the vertical field. and revenue.

Mao Taotao introduced that Weibo will focus on helping Internet celebrities expand their scale this year and improve their market competitiveness and monetization efficiency. Weibo has many experiences in the process of verticalization, such as traffic support based on Weibo's open communication advantages, recommendation to users combined with big data, and rich monetization methods. For more grassroots Internet celebrities, these support policies can obtain better results.

However, Weibo does not directly cooperate with Internet celebrities. Currently, there are less than 10 online brokerage companies working with Weibo. If Internet celebrities want to do business on Weibo, they can sign up for the brokerage company recommended by Weibo. Weibo manages these brokerage companies to ensure the order of the market and the entire ecosystem. Internet celebrities are divided into agencies, and Internet celebrities are equivalent to big customers of Weibo. They place advertisements on Weibo.

The boundaries between advertising and content blur and

everything is moving towards a richer and more diverse content ecosystem.

On this basis, Weibo has been optimizing information flow algorithms since last year. In addition to allowing users to obtain information based on their attention relationships, Weibo also analyzes users 'browsing habits and recommends content that may be of interest to them in the information flow, thereby improving the efficiency of users' consumption of information.

Xu Zhibin, author of the book "Social Dividend" and vice president of Weibo Yi, analyzed to reporters that Weibo has gone through three stages from its birth to the present: in the first stage, everything is missing, and as long as users enter Weibo, they are very popular. Welcome, cold jokes and jokes become popular like this; in the second stage, there is nothing missing, so no one cares if you open an account; At the current stage, the content is extremely rich, and users are willing to give it longer, but producers have to give it better.

Xu Zhibin said that today's Social networks, as before, have always been committed to doing one thing, that is, giving the right content to the right people at the right time and in the right way. The same is true for Weibo.

As the verticalization deepens, the content will become richer and richer, and media, self-media, Short Video, and live broadcasts will be active on the same platform. With the optimization of information flow algorithms, user data becomes increasingly sound, and push accuracy will become higher and higher. This will bring unlimited imagination to future advertising and e-commerce models. The boundary between advertising and content will become increasingly blurred, and online shopping will become more and more situational.

Editor: yvette