Weibo Continues To Be The 'YouTube Of China'

CLSA’s James Lee mentioned that checks continue to indicate that Weibo Corp (ADR) WB “is the default online celebrity platform in China - or the YouTube of China.”

Lee believes Weibo’s platform is particularly effective at driving ecommerce sales, especially for Taobao. The platform has short “how to” videos, similar to YouTube, made by online celebrities and addressing issues relevant to Weibo users, most of whom were born post 1990.

“Weibo’s CPMs are much lower at $3 vs WeChat Moments at $15. At the same time, data is much better post Taobao’s API integration as Weibo can do an efficient job at audience segmenting as the company gets sales category data from the ecommerce platform,” the analyst stated.

KOLs

Lee also pointed out that checks suggest that “grass-roots influencers” or key opinion leaders (KOLs) are been boosting Weibo’s popularity and driving monetization opportunities.

With more than 600,000 KOLs, talent agencies see this as an opportunity to recruit KOLs to drive influence on Weibo, and the analyst believes that the company might well be breeding ground for the next generation content creation, being to generate revenues from transaction and advertising models.

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