Recognized as the most influential internet media in China, Sina has its magic wands. Its news channel, what it was famous for, offers reportedly the best editoral content online. Sports, dominating Chinese sports online media consumption with more than 50% of sports fans read sports news on sina. blog, the new channel quickly attracted some of the most influential bloggers in China, then raised to be top 3 traffic drivers. finance, reading, and woman channels also rank the top in their categories.
Sina is consistent the #1 choice of Chinese advertisers, especially for the high end industry like automobile and real estate. "CEOs read sina." has been the image that people say when they talk about sina. I also heard from quite a few people that sina has one of the best conversion rate among portals with any kind of campaign.
ummm... yum... with internet media changing rapidly, QQ and baidu surpassed sina's #1 traffic ranking in the past a couple of years. other portals are chasing behind it. So, what is the future for sina?
Sina is almost like yahoo, other than expanding to every single new thing there is, it couldn't do much. Sina does feel fatigue sometimes with these kind of endless expansion while competing with the leader of the category, giving up their iAsk search and striking a deal with google was a perfect example. UC instant messenger was also a complete failure.
Sina seems like not really favor acquisitions, other than some SP aquisitions, it failed to acquired some of the best vertical sites (arguably). However, itself was involved in quite a few rumors of being acquired, Google, Focus Media, Yahoo, including a hostel takeover attempt by SANDA, a freaking game company. Come on... ...
I spoke at one of sina's conferences for advertisers. Just out of curiousity i looked through their channels. I have to say, it is a bit messy. dead links, duplicated sections, outdated stuff are everywhere. yuck...
With nowhere else to expand to other than China, unlike Yahoo, Sina will have to think about something else other than catching the wave of internet booming in China. With the 40% year by year growth of Chinese internet users, Sina will stand on the top for another 5 years probably. but What is going to happen beyond that?
Make some bold moves, at least...
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