Tech Planet (WeChat ID: tech618)
Wen | Chen Qiaohui
Cover source | Visual China
Sina launched an important exploration in business monetization.
"Xinyan Finance" exclusively learned that Sina Tongcheng recently officially launched a community product "Hobby", the product positioning is the trend of young people to explore the store to create a community. It is reported that "Hobby" creates a community social platform that is "trendy enough, fun enough, and comprehensive enough" for the Z generation hipster group through content co-creation, star clubs, and card collection.
As of press time, "Hobby" ranked as high as 7th in the App Store's social charts. In September 2019, Weibo's Oasis App also briefly became popular in the App Store.
"Hobby" integrates attributes such as B station, Tieba, Little Red Book, and short videos
According to the "New Talk Finance" experience, "Hobby" is a trendy community platform, and the entire product tends to mature. In addition, the system message in its app contains a welcome phrase of "playing with the trend culture metaverse", which shows that this social product has the attributes of the metacosm.
The home page design layout of "Hobby" is similar to the home page of Station B. The content in the homepage involves new trend fun, trend fashion, trend sports, tide play art, street dance, script killing, Hanfu, Three Pits, secret room, game e-sports, black technology, book and video, animation, pets, food, board games, etc. By enriching categories, we have built a diversified gathering place for trendy cultural content.
In addition to the medium and long video content of different categories such as "tide shoes", "tide clothes" and "tide play" in the home page, users can also see information such as "script killing" and "party". After entering the video playback interface, users can not only watch the video, but also launch a star screen (similar to the "bullet screen"), and also be able to tip the UP master like the B station.
Image source: Screenshot of the Hobby app.
It is worth noting that this type of medium-length video mainly takes the playback time of 0.5min-3min as the core, accounting for 80% of the content of the whole site.
In addition, "Hobby" will also short video as a separate function, put in the bottom navigation bar of the App, the content of short video is mainly based on life, trends, users can slide up and down. In addition, "Hobby" allows users to post relevant content, such as graphic grass ("Hobby" is called "notes" in the "Hobby"), video content ("Hobby" is called "Star Works"), and parties (parties can be participated in offline and online, organized by the initiator).
Image source: Screenshot from the "Hobby" app.
In addition, "Hobby" has two major functions, namely "Planet" and "Star Society". In the planet, users can contribute, and they can also get star cards to redeem the platform's goodies, while merchants can enter the "trend map" for commercial promotion.
"Hobby" "Star Society" function is similar to the community, users can join different clubs, and in the community to publish dynamics, works, and even participate in group chats for topic discussion, in addition, the community also supports the setting of stores, users can view the relevant store introduction in the store, for the merchant to drain.
Overall, "Hobby" is a community product that integrates attributes such as B station, Tieba, Little Red Book, and short videos, which can experience different trend characteristic cultures and realize the cultivation of grass in stores. Currently, "Hobby" ranks as high as 7th in the App Store's social charts.
An important exploration of Sina's diversification in the business ecosystem
The launch of "Hobby" is part of Sina's exploration of diversified and complementary business ecosystems.
On March 23, 2021, Sina officially announced the completion of privatization. At the same time, Sina Chairman Cao Guowei issued an internal letter to all employees, saying that Sina privatization is not the end of an era, but a new structure to better explore the future.
"After privatization, the original Sina portal business with Sina Mobile as the main body will be more closely integrated with the Weibo business, while vertical businesses such as Sina Finance, Sina Finance and Sina Sports will develop more independently." At the same time, Sina will increase investment in the future, accelerate the pace of mergers and acquisitions, and achieve diversified business development. ”
The diversified development of business mentioned by Cao Guowei has begun as early as 2019, and these developments mainly revolve around Weibo.
The first is to launch "Oasis" in the second half of 2019, linked with Weibo to create a living grass community; then, Sina Shangke launched the "ADA Community" to explore virtual social platforms; then in 2020, Weibo upgraded its e-commerce business and launched Weibo Small Shop, which supports a complete set of store management services for platform e-commerce users, including commodity management, selection tools, data services, promotion information settings, etc.
In addition, in order to accelerate the content output of UGC videos and PGC videos, Sina has launched "Weibo Video Number" and "Planet Video", which just integrates and categorizes a large number of disorderly video content on Weibo, and also helps users on Weibo to create a new entertainment gathering point to avoid excessive content flow on Weibo.
It is these measures that have brought sustained growth to Weibo. According to the fourth quarter and full year of 2021 financial report released by Weibo, the total revenue of Weibo in the fourth quarter reached 616 million US dollars, an increase of 20% year-on-year, of which advertising revenue reached 550 million US dollars, an increase of 21% year-on-year. For the full year of 2021, Weibo's total revenue reached US$2.26 billion, up 34% year-on-year.
But Sina obviously can't just revolve around Weibo, and the business ecosystem needs to be more diversified. The emergence of "Hobby" allows Sina to try business exploration outside of Weibo. But from the actual point of view, such a "Hobby" that integrates the shadow of multiple products, how to create differentiation, to capture the hearts of young people, will be the next topic that needs to be discussed, in addition, how to achieve commercial realization, will also be an important aspect of "Hobby" thinking.