The Chinese micro-blogging service Weibo reached a remarkable milestone on October when its market cap grew to $11.35 billion and beat its US rival Twitter’s $11.34 billion with a small difference.
After that, the gap has further increased after Twitter’s stock fell to $11.23 billion compared to Weibo’s valuation of $11.32 billion.
Sina Weibo is now the hottest micro-blogging service in China now and consumes 90% market shares of China’s micro-blogging services. It was launched in 2009 and is called the “Chinese Twitter” by many people at that time. Three years after it started, Weibo has already had 503 million registered users, a significant majority of the 640 million Internet users that China holds. Its stock market launch was in 2014 at a valuation of $3.4 billion, when Twitter was estimated to worth $26.8 billion on the same day. It’s really an impressive achievement for Weibo to defeat Twitter in only seven years.
Weibo is more versatile than a simple clone of Twitter. In fact, the platforme functions more like a combination of Facebook and Twitter, but ultimately unique. Not only users of Sina Weibo do publish more posts than those on Twitter, they are also inclined to give more personal information about themselves. They are more active in reacting with other people and to share their views.
Weibo concentrates more in user experience than Twitter. It has threaded comment, rich media, micro topics, trend categorization, hall of celebrity, medal reward system, more style templates and Weibo event… every major features in the Weibo are designed to be easy to use, more personal, and exist to attract new users, retain elite users, and encourage all users to tweet more and have more fun. What’s more, Weibo’s recent foray into China’s hottest new web trend – live streaming – is another reason for its success. Live streaming brings in not only a lot of visitors, but also additional revenue by allowing viewers to buy virtual gifts for streamers.
Therefore, it’s no supprise to see that Weibo is attracting an increasing amount of users – 70 million active monthly users over the past 12 months.
On the contrary, Twitter is going through some tough times by struggling to keep its users. The company has lost more than 5 million monthly users in the last 12 months. The rumors of Twitter is up for sale but failed to find any buyers made the situation worse, as the potential buyers of Twitter like Google, Disney and Salesforce are not going to implement this buy-out.
For more imformation, click here:
https://www.techinasia.com/twitter-worth-less-than-weibo-ouch
http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/things-twitter-can-learn-from-sina-weibo/
