Wang Gaofei, who did the nucleic acid screening this morning, or zong, still couldn't help but express his opinion on Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
He retweeted a long article quoted by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey, and said that Dorsey has always wanted to make Twitter a "protocol network" rather than a "social product".
Wang Is certainly qualified to speak out about Musk's $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, as well as Jack Dorsey himself.
Because, he is the CEO of Weibo.
Weibo is already benchmarking Twitter, and Wang Gaofei, as the CEO and soul of Weibo, naturally also benchmarks the Twitter CEO, whether it is the founding predecessor or the current incumbent.
In particular, Twitter's current CEO, Parag Agrawal, would receive about $42 million in damages if he were fired within 12 months of Musk's acquisition of Twitter and a change in control of the company (Musk had previously said he had no confidence in Twitter's current management).
Wang Gaofei may not be red-eyed. But the good ones think for him.
Under Musk's latest Weibo posted on April 23 about Tesla China, netizens have left comments:
After receiving Twitter, it is better to buy Weibo as well!
This is naturally a joke.
Putting aside regulatory factors, although today's Weibo still firmly stands in the C position of domestic social media, its business imagination continues to decline, and its attractiveness to investors is getting worse and worse.
It should be known that at the beginning of 2017, the market value of Weibo as a follower once surpassed Twitter, which was once regarded as a symbol event of the domestic mobile Internet by the industry: relying on the domestic mobile Internet dividend and localization innovation, domestic Internet companies have the capital to have the ability to complete the transcendence of the ancestor company of Silicon Valley.
But today, even if Weibo chooses to go to Hong Kong for a second listing, its market value has not improved. At present, the market value of Weibo is only about $5 billion, compared to Musk's willingness to pay $44 billion for Twitter, the same old head mobile Internet company, the same social media giant, but the two have long ceased to be one dimension.
Why did Weibo come to this?
Weibo's 2021 annual report shows that in 2021, Weibo's total revenue reached US$2.26 billion, an increase of 34% year-on-year, adjusted operating profit reached US$829.2 million, an increase of 43% year-on-year, and adjusted annual operating profit margin reached 37%.
Not only that, in December 2021, Weibo's monthly active users were 573 million, a net increase of about 52 million users year-on-year, and mobile monthly active users accounted for 95% of the overall monthly active users. In December 2021, Weibo's average daily active life was 249 million, a net increase of about 25 million year-on-year.
Whether it is revenue scale, profitability, or user data, Weibo's 2021 annual report looks very good.
In wang's words, this fully reflects the strong momentum and resilience of our business recovering after the epidemic.
However, it is worth noting that the basic disk of Weibo has not been changed like a game-breaking.
On the one hand, revenue is still heavily dependent on advertising.
According to the financial report, in 2021, Weibo advertising revenue reached 1.98 billion US dollars, accounting for 87.6%. At the same time, the number of advertisers continues to decline, with the number of Weibo advertisers from 2018 to 2020 being 2.9 million, 2.4 million and 1.6 million, respectively. In the first three quarters of 2021, the number of Weibo advertisers was 800,000, down 600,000 from 1.4 million in the same period in 2020.
On the one hand, Weibo has still failed to find new growth.
In the past few years, Weibo has also launched emerging products such as video numbers and oasises, hoping to make breakthroughs in the field of video and ins social networking. But for now, these attempts are hardly successful.
More critically, Weibo's content ecology is still a pool of muddy waters.
Weibo once relied on entertainment, stars, and sinking in exchange for traffic monetization, and rose twice, but today, the drawbacks of this "entertainment to death" have also been revealed. Online violence, entertainment gossip, and hunting news flooded Weibo in large numbers, reducing the user experience and making Weibo a "garbage dump" in the mouths of many netizens, while also leading to stricter policy and regulatory risks faced by Weibo.
In August last year, Weibo removed the "star power list", which was a rectification action under typical regulatory pressure.
Obviously, at this time, Weibo is no longer sexy in the capital market, especially under the siege and interception of Douyin, Kuaishou, B Station, Little Red Book, etc., and its attractiveness to hot money has naturally dropped significantly.
Twitte, of course, faces a similar dilemma. There is also a ceiling for user growth, and advertising revenue is also fiercely competed by Snapchat, Pinterest and Instagram.
But however, Twitter has die-hard fans and is the world's richest man Musk is willing to escort it with real money and silver.
Musk is a full-fledged Twitter maniac.
According to statistics, between June 2010 and June 2020, Musk posted a total of 11,000 tweets, an average of six per day. In the two years from 2018 to 2020, Musk tweeted more than the past eight years combined. It feels like Musk is industrious less of a top tech entrepreneur with seven companies and more of a Twitter marketing number.
At the same time, Musk itself is gold-rich and very appealing, and can easily leverage huge amounts of money. According to the Forbes Rich List, Musk is currently worth $268 billion, ranking the world's richest man. To buy Twitter, Musk will provide about $21 billion in equity commitments, and he also secured $25.5 billion in debt and margin loan financing.
And Weibo, there is no "Musk".
Even if there may have been, whether it was a few years ago when the industry speculated whether shareholder Ali would have an acquisition move, or last year's rumor that Cao Guowei led the privatization, it was finally falsified.
Now Weibo, there is no "savior", can only rely on themselves.
As always, Wang Gaofei plays with netizens every day in the name of "coming and going" on Weibo, talks about current affairs, chats about gossip, talks about views, and contributes a super high-quality and high-viscosity and CEO duan position user to Weibo, which can be regarded as diligent and sincere.
But he also knows in his heart that in the form of Weibo/Twitter, a global Internet product, he is no longer the protagonist.
(Source|.) AI Blue Media Collection Author |Ye II)