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Sina Weibo is old and strong, or standing still

introduction

As a content platform launched in 2009, Weibo has been almost 15 years ago, as an early content platform, Weibo still maintains a monthly activity of 5~600 million, which is the largest graphic platform for the current more active users, which is very difficult. Weibo's 2022 financial report data shows that its revenue is $1.836 billion, with a profit margin of about 30%. However, whether it is in terms of the number of monthly active users or the means of monetization, Weibo is already a mature application, and it is not easy for its market share and revenue to maintain stability in such a fierce competitive environment. The following is the revenue and monthly activity of several different Internet companies, although Weibo is not outstanding, but the monthly activity is large and has a positive profit (not reflected in the table).

Platform annual revenue (100 million yuan), monthly active (100 million yuan), valuation (100 million US dollars), Xiaohongshu 2023 adjustment expectation: 180-2002.6200, Zhihu 2022, 36.051.0075.5, Weibo, 2022, 123.75~625B station, 2022, 2193.050, ByteDance, 2023, about 700025 (global), 2680, Pinduoduo, 2022~2023198461980

Judging from the monthly active activity ranking, Weibo is second only to WeChat and Pinduoduo in the field of communication and social networking, and the number of monthly active users ranks third. Among the apps with more monthly active users, there are not many that were established earlier than Weibo, mainly QQ (1999), Ctrip (1999) and Dianping (2003). As an old APP for more than ten years, Weibo has entered a stable period, so whether it is old and strong or standing still, let's try to answer this question.

Internet content platform - Weibo is old and strong or stagnant

Monthly active leaderboard

The development history and characteristics of Weibo

Founded in 2009, Weibo was initially positioned as a platform for sharing short, real-time information, and this feature has been maintained to this day. By 2011, with the rapid development of the mobile Internet, Weibo, a short and fast form of content, was very much in line with the needs of the mobile Internet at that time, so it was able to expand rapidly during this period. In 2014, Weibo was listed on the NASDAQ and began to explore commercialization to achieve profitability through advertising, value-added services, etc.

The development history of Weibo

It can be seen from the development of Weibo that in terms of form, Weibo is mainly based on short pictures and texts, and the creation threshold is low, which can form a good interactive community atmosphere. In terms of content, Weibo pays attention to timeliness, and until now, many hot searches on the Internet are still from Weibo as the initial diffusion platform. Therefore, as a graphic content platform with high timeliness and low threshold, relying on a large number of entertainment users, Weibo maintains its position as the largest graphic content platform.

Although in terms of content form, Weibo and Xiaohongshu are similar to short pictures and texts. But their logic is different, Weibo is still biased towards current news, and opinion leaders (KOLs) are the main content creators. Xiaohongshu, on the other hand, focuses more on sharing life experiences and encourages long-tail creators. It is probably the difference between "eating melons quickly" and "slow life".

Recently, self-media platforms have begun to promote the "front desk real name" system, requiring some big Vs under specific themes to come out with their real names for everyone to see. Under this system, some Weibo influencers have begun to clean up followers or give up part of their revenues, which is expected to have some negative impact on the activity of the community.

Business model and business logic

Like other Internet content platforms, Weibo's business model is to maintain a friendly community of communication and sharing, and monetize the community's traffic, using advertising and value-added services.

Weibo's business model canvas

Weibo's business logic can be deeply deconstructed into three key dimensions: user behavior analysis, content community interaction mechanism, and advertising business model.

As the data cornerstone of the microblogging platform, users present dual identities - they are both content consumers and content producers. Through in-depth mining of user behavior data, we find that the user structure of Weibo has a significant head concentration effect. In particular, key opinion leaders (KOLs) such as big Vs in the entertainment industry have played a crucial leading role in the Weibo content ecosystem, not only influencing the information consumption habits of ordinary users, but also shaping the content trend of the platform. As the carrier of user interaction, the content community builds a dynamic and real-time information exchange space through diversified interactive forms such as likes and comments. This engagement data not only reflects users' preferences and attitudes towards content, but is also an important indicator of content quality and community activity. As an important part of Weibo's business model, advertisers mainly include content cooperation and traffic display.

In the entire business logic and operation process, a series of data will be generated, including interactive data describing the community atmosphere, user behavior characteristic data, etc., through the analysis of these data, the effect of platform operation and advertising can be improved. This is also where data analytics can be used to bring value to the overall business logic.

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Key figures

Overall, Weibo's revenue has experienced a period of rapid growth in 2014~2018, and the follow-up is basically stable, maintaining around 150 to 20 billion. In 2021, Weibo's revenue just exceeded 20 billion, but in 2022, due to the bad economic situation, advertisers have reduced their advertising budgets, resulting in a decline in Weibo's revenue.

Weibo revenue growth

In 2023, Weibo's rivals such as Bilibili, Kuaishou, Baidu and other advertising-based platforms have begun to increase their revenue, but Weibo's revenue is still declining, which can't help but cause market concerns. At the same time, although the revenue will not recover well in 2023, Weibo has taken measures to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and try to reduce costs to avoid a rapid decline in profits.

Weibo revenue and profit

Compared with other content platforms, Weibo's ad loading rate is on the high side, and the comparison data in the figure below should be a little earlier. In any case, in terms of simply increasing advertising revenue, it is expected that Weibo will bring limited advantages to revenue.

Comparison of ad load rates

In terms of monthly active users, Weibo's situation is not as bad as it seems to be in terms of revenue, and as an already large monthly active app, Weibo has continued to maintain the growth of its user base over the past year. This is mainly due to Weibo's user operation strategy, which refinedly operates vertical content such as digital, automobile, gaming, medical, beauty, sports, and tourism, which has increased the exposure of these fields in hot searches, and the average daily vertical hot search traffic has increased significantly, and the proportion has also increased significantly. At the same time, we will actively expand the scale of creators in vertical fields to attract more high-quality content and fans. In addition, Weibo also cleverly uses hot IP content such as literature and art, sports and other hot topics to drive user growth in industries such as food and beverage, film and television entertainment, so as to attract a wider range of user groups and achieve rapid growth of overall users.

Weibo's monthly active growth

However, according to QuestMobile data, as of May 2023, Douyin and Kuaishou have 36.6 hours and 23.3 hours per capita per month, respectively, while Weibo only has 10.9 hours — not even as good as Bilibili and Xiaohongshu. Of course, being robbed of users' attention by short videos is a reality that almost all Internet platforms must face, even Toutiao, which is the same as Douyin. Under this trend, Weibo can only continue to work hard to expand its number of users. But in fact, under the current user base of Weibo, there is still a lot of content that can be expanded, for example, Weibo now also provides video content, and also provides content similar to Xiaohongshu's life sharing, on the basis of occupying short and fast content, Weibo still has a chance to retain these users, as long as these users can be retained, they can be maintained, waiting for the next breakthrough opportunity.

brief summary

With the transition of the Internet from the rapid development of more than ten years to the stock game, Weibo as a veteran application, we should say whether he is old and strong or standing still. Obviously, if a platform can't adjust its strategy with the times, it won't continue to operate for so long, so I personally prefer Weibo to be an old and strong platform. Although users' attention is constantly attracted by other platforms due to the impact of various other apps, Weibo itself is also changing, trying to improve user stickiness, at least for now, it seems that it has not declined.

This may also be the pattern that will naturally form in the long-term development of the Internet, and the traffic of each platform is in a relatively stable state, as long as it continues to strive to keep up with this era, it can be maintained. It will not be like before, such as the "Hundred Group War", "Bicycle Sharing" and other crazy money-burning competition, and in the end there are only one or two winners.

- END -

Of course, if you are interested, you can continue to study in depth, if you have any questions or anything else you want to know, please feel free to send me a private message.

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Internet content platform - Weibo is old and strong or stagnant