SINA Corporation’s (NASDAQ:SINA) Q4 earnings report wasn’t warmly embraced by investors. Shares were down more than 5 percent in after-hours trading last night. Still, SINA’s Twitter-like Weibo service (pronounced Way-Bwah) proved a bright spot. Interest in Weibo helped push up traffic and online ad revenues for the site’s parent company SINA by 30 percent to $82.5 million in the quarter.
Weibo’s total number of users also soared, doubling to 100 million in just four months. “The firm has said Weibo will start generating revenue in the first half of 2011 via the sale of virtual items and advertising space,” Reuters reports.
“2010 has been a year of transformation for Sina,” Sina CEO Charles Chao said. Besides ad growth, “we have successfully built Sina microblog Weibo into the largest and most influential social media platform in China, with user base increasing by more than 25 times in 2010.”
SINA’s increasingly pitting the company’s future on the back of the micro-blogging service. Indeed, SINA plans to open Weibo up to outside developers in a bid to transform the company from an Internet portal to a social networking Internet platform that can tap outside app developers for growth and innovation.
The approach is similar to Facebook’s App platform, which has led to incredible growth for game development studios like Zynga (not to mention spiking valuations, pageviews and time-on-site for Facebook). So long as Weibo’s in-house censors are fast enough to keep the Chinese government happy, SINA’s $5 billion market cap could look laughably small one day. Twitter may have more users, but it isn’t backed by an Internet portal and it’s already got a valuation that’s nearing $4.5 billion. SINA’s best days may be yet to come.
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Tags: Facebook, Facebook IPO, SINA, Sina Weibo, Zynga
