Sina Weibo Launches User Data Center, A Potential Source of Revenue [Infographic]

What more can Sina Weibo offer users? They can offer their 140 million users tools to track and monitor their own Weibo accounts, and that is exactly what Sina did by launching data.weibo.com. The site allows users to monitor their own accounts on a weekly basis–user data is analyzed from the last 7 days and presented in 5 main categories:

1. User influence rating – calculate through 3 main factors: How viral is the user’s Weibo, how active is the user, and the range of coverage of the user. And  lists of users with top influence ratings of both users I follow and my followers.
2. My followers – this section is a detailed analysis of my followers, within a one-week range. I’m told my followers’ top 10 interested topics, their gender ratio, and geographically where they are located even with top tags in that area. To be more personal, I am also told which of my followers commented my Weibo the most in the past week, the top 10 most active followers, my own number of followers growth trend and a graphical representation of influence ratings of all of my followers.
3. People I follow – same as the ‘my followers’ section with top 10 topics of interest, sex ratios and geographical densities. One difference is the ’2 degrees’ of my social network, where I can see top 10 users I have interacted with the most within my Weibo network and the same 10 users for each of these people (100 people within my network). For most users it is very interesting to see who their friends are interacting with in Weibo.
4. Weekly Top Weibo – Weibo filtered by number of reposts and comments from the past week.
5. Top Trending Topics – This links back to Sina Weibo’s hot topics page.

This is the beginning of Sina Weibo offering value-added data services, data.weibo.com is only a normal user version which can be seen as a demo of what’s to come next. I’m told that an enterprise version will be available for corporate Weibo accounts, and that is one part of the six revenue sources announced by Sina. Twitter does not offer such services itself, instead users rely on third-party services like Klout.

Twitter does, however, make money by selling “the firehose” (access to all of its data) to major corporate clients, which is another direction Sina Weibo could go. An anonymous user on Quora (which I’ve also heard from other sources) comments:

“In addition to sponsored topics and promoted tweets, [Twitter] also sells access to the firehose. Bing, Google, and NTT Docomo pay $ Millions to Twitter for access to the firehose for their search and other content products. Other companies license the firehose or subsets of it through their data reseller partners GNIP and DataSift.”

Positives of the data center

1. New purpose to Weibo – users now have a quantitative and qualitative rating on how well they are using their Weibo, with an influence rating combined with top 10 topics that a user can target his Weibo contents to. The next stage would be for Sina to provide specific activity timelines, but that’s expected in the enterprise version of data center.
2. An Extra Dimension in Microblog Social Networking –  knowing who’s interacting with you the most can certainly encourage a user to reach out and strengthen the bond between his “cloest friends” on Weibo. Knowing who their friends are interacting with can be even more interesting especially when seeing friends are interacting with each other. This is Weibo’s latest bid to increase the stickiness of its users which must be achieved as it turns the platform into a real SNS.

Negatives of the Data Center

1. Privacy control – good things can also be turn for the worse. Knowing who’s interested in what is acceptable by most users, but following a Weibo user does not mean that user is a ‘real friend’. In other words, to have such others view your social network within Weibo may be a disturbing piece of news, especially since Sina Weibo (like every other SNS in China) offers minimal privacy control. Users has almost next to nothing in privacy control options. Breaching personal privacy is an imminent risk that most Chinese internet users are yet unaware of.
2. Imbalance in the Weibo Open Platform Ecology – with the launch of data.weibo.com, developers and third party agencies fear Sina Weibo is stepping into territory that should be left for them. The data on data.weibo.com resembles some of the earlier applications developed by third parties. It’s always a risk when you build on top of a ‘platform’ by an existing power that could enter into your market.

Overall Sina Weibo is charging ahead by providing as many quality services as possible. I recently received an investors advisory report based on my earlier blog Can Sina Weibo Become the Facebook of China? The analyst commented that despite the enhanced functionality, Sina Weibo has yet to present feasible sources of revenue to support the platform and its future growth. I can’t say that Sina Weibo’s revenues sources are very clear yet but it is certainly testing a lot. But, tough challenges still exist for Sina to overcome, such as transforming user behavior from microblog to SNS and maintaining an healthy Open Platform for developers and third party agencies.

To quote Sina Weibo’s Chief of Open Platform @indigo:

To influence users to enhance their [social] taste, or [simply] follow users to meet all of their demands, designing a trend leading product we must learn to give up some things, such as Apple [has done]…

What Sina Weibo decides to create and let go will be a deciding factor in whether this platform will be the first to unite as much as possible of the fragmented Chinese social internet.

(The sample data in this infographic is presented in the exact order as it is on data.weibo.com)

(This infographic involved personal information disclosure of myself and people within my Weibo social networks, approval is required for external use.)