What Is Weibo Anyway?
March 29, 2014 Leave a comment
Mar 19, 2014
What Is Weibo Anyway?
NED LEVIN
Nobody seems to know what Weibo Corp. is worth, though its IPO should value it at several billion dollars. And in honor of Weibo’s U.S. IPO filing last Friday—the company is spinning off from Chinese web media parent SinaSINA -1.34% Corp–MoneyBeat took to the Journal archives to answer another imponderable: just what is Weibo anyway?
Foreign media—including The Wall Street Journal–have struggled for elegant descriptions of Weibo ever since it launched in August 2009. But most agree it’s likeTwitterTWTR -1.21%.
The first Journal report we could find to describe Weibo–in August 2010, a full year after its launch–helped set the trend by calling it a “Twitter-like microblogging website.”
The problem with Twitter comparisons is that Weibo offers many features that Twitter doesn’t: Users can comment in long threads on single 140 character posts, chat in popup windows, and play online games.
Plus, “Twitter-like microblogging website” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Reporters have soldiered on. They’ve called it a “miniblog service,” “the most talked-about microblogging site in China” and also simply a “popular site.” But Twitter has been the most frequent reference; the Guardian has called it “the Chinese Twitter that dwarfs Twitter.”
Weibo sees itself differently. It only mentions Twitter four times in its prospectus, and never as a comparable product. The prospectus’s cover page calls Weibo “a microcosm of Chinese society and a cultural phenomenon.” In the summary, it’s “a leading social platform for people to create, distribute and discover Chinese-language content.”
Chinese media has had an easier time describing Weibo as it means “microblog” generically in Mandarin, so it’s largely self-explanatory. In fact, while Sina has claimed the name “Weibo Corporation,” and Weibo has long been English shorthand for Sina’s microblog, competitors Tencent, Sina and Netease all host their own, less popular Weibos.
Netease Weibo’s tagline? “A Weibo with attitude”. We’ll look for that in the coverage when it IPOs.
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