【英语科技】新浪CEO：微博盈利只是时间问题

The head of China's leading web portal said Tuesday that he is confident the company's Twitter-like microblogging service will be a profitable business.

Speaking at a conference for third-party developers in Beijing, Sina CEO Charles Chaosaid he hopes the service, Sina Weibo, will one day grow large enough to become the company's largest source of revenue.

Globally, microblogging has yet to be provenas a successful business model. Sina Weibo's older, U.S.-based counterpart, Twitter, has been testing advertising models such as selling Promoted Tweets, or microblog entries that are highlighted when users search for keywords on Twitter, but has yet to turn the popular service into a highly profitable enterprise.

Chao said Sina is still researching potential advertising models, but is currently more focused on building its userbase and platform.

The company hopes the developers Chao was addressing will create software applications for both mobile devices and computers around Sina Weibo. Existing applications include Sina Weibo clients for Apple's iPhones and phones running Google's Android, as well as an application that integrates Chinese location-based social networking service Jiepang, which operates similarly to FourSquare. There is also software through which users can access their Sina microblogs through e-readers.

Chao said more than 40% of Sina Weibo users access the service through the network of China's largest mobile carrier, China Mobile, and that he expects this percentage to grow. The company is working with handset vendors and mobile platforms to promote related mobile applications.

Sina, which recently announced a partnershipwith a joint-venture company of Microsoft, also announced at the conference that Sina Weibo has so far attracted 50 million users who collectively post 25 million comments per day. The company says an average of 10 million new users have signed up for the service per month since August of this year.

Analysts say it is the largest service of its kind in China. The company has said it hopes the service, which launched in 2009, will reach 100 million users next. In comparison, Twitter launched in 2006 and had more than 160 million users worldwide as of September.

Twitter has been blocked in China for over a year as part of the Chinese government's efforts to regulate Internet use, but has a small following of tech-savvy users, including a number of political dissidents, who access the website through circumvention technology. Content posted to Sina Weibo undergoes filtering by Sina itself, in accordance with regulations that require all Chinese Internet companies to police their websites and remove objectionable content.

Even so, many vibrant discussions of controversial topics can still be found on the Sina service. Chinese Internet watchers say this is in part because Sina Weibo has significantly sped up the spread of news online, making it tougherfor government censors to clamp down.

Similar to Twitter, Sina Weibo users post short entries (140 characters or less) to their profiles, and can follow and interact with other users. And as with Twitter, Sina Weibo has attracted large numbers of celebrities and thought leaders.

But the site has a number of features that Twitter doesn't have, including the ability to embed photos and videos into posts, and to comment on directly on people's microblogs. Meanwhile, Twitter is run indepedently while Sina Weibo can be integrated with Sina's other content.

Chao said he expects the growth of Sina Weibo to have a positive impact on Sina's digital media business as a whole.

新浪微博页面周二，中国领先门户网站首席执行长说，他相信公司的微博服务将来会成为盈利的业务。

在北京召开的中国首届微博开发者大会上，新浪首席执行长曹国伟说，他希望新浪微博服务会逐渐发展成公司最大的收入来源。

从全球来看，微博是否是成功的商业模式还有待证实。比新浪微博历史更长，总部在美国的微博网站Twitter一直在测试广告模式，例如推出了Promoted Tweets，也就是用户在Twitter上搜索关键字时会突出显示的微博内容，但Twitter还未能将这热门的服务变成高盈利的企业。

曹国伟说，新浪仍在研究可能的广告模式，但目前更注重于扩大用户基数和构建平台。

公司希望，出席曹国伟演讲的开发者能围绕新浪微博开发出同时适用于手机设备和电脑的软件应有程序。已有的应有程序包括新浪微博的苹果iPhone客户端和谷歌Android手机客户端，整合中国以位置为基础的社交服务街旁（Jiepang）的应有程序，街旁与国外的FourSquare类似。用户还可通过电子阅读器登录新浪微博。

曹国伟说，新浪微博超过40%的用户都是通过中国最大的移动运营商中国移动使用微博服务，他预计这个百分比还会增长。公司正与手机供应商和移动平台合作，共同开发相关的移动应用程序。

新浪最近宣布与微软（Microsoft）的一家合资公司达成合作协议。新浪在这次大会上宣布，目前为止新浪微博用户数已达5000万，新浪微博用户平均每天发布超过2500万条微博内容。公司说，从今年8月开始，平均每月增长了1000万新用户

分析师说，新浪微博是中国最大的微博服务。新浪曾表示，希望2009年启动的微博服务下一步达到1亿用户。而2006年启动的Twitter截至9月份在全球范围内共有1.6亿用户。

由于中国政府希望对互联网使用进行监管，导致Twitter在中国被封一年多，但仍有小部分精通科技的用户通过“翻 ”使用Twitter，其中包括一些政治异见人士。根据规定，所有的中国互联网公司必须对其网站进行监管，将不符合规定的内容删除，因此新浪会对新浪微博上发布的内容进行过滤。

即便如此，许多对争议话题的热烈讨论仍然可以在新浪微博上找到。 中国互联网监管机构说，部分是因为新浪微博大幅提高了新闻的网络传播速度，使得政府审查机构难以进行管制。

与Twitter一样，新浪微博用户通过个人主页发布短消息，限制在140字以内，还可以关注其他用户并与他们互动，同时新浪微博还吸引了大量名人和意见领袖。

但新浪微博还有一些Twitter没有的特色功能，包括将照片和视频嵌入发布的内容，以及在其他用户的微博主页上直接评论。同时，Twitter是独立运营，而新浪微博可与新浪其他服务进行结合。

曹国伟说，他希望新浪微博的发展会对新浪整个数字媒体业务带来积极影响。