get used to seeing this
 

Weibo: The Shape of Things to Come?

Posted June 25, 2017
Share To
 
 

My favorite newspaper is the FT

Particularly the Weekend FT. 

This morning, I came across a fascinating tid bit of information on page 16.

Buried in a small column entitled Weibo: Killing The Video Star.

Weibo (which means Micro blogging in Chinese) is a very popular website in China, with more than 500 million users.

Friday, Weibo's shares, which trade on the NYSE, dropped 6% after the Chinese government banned Weibo from showing videos that don't have the 'appropriate license'. (Were the US to do this to Facebook or Youtube, it would pretty much evsicerate those companies).

"All social media groups have put an increasing emphasis on video", writes the FT.

A fifth of Weibo's $170m in revenue in the first quarter of 2017 was from video alone.

The Chinese (and there are 1.4 billion of them), devote a quarter of their time on mobile to watching videos.  Only Instant Messages capture more time.

 

 


Recent Posts

For most of human history, people lived in a world without news. The concept simply did not exist. The idea of news is really a 19th-century phenomenon, driven first by newspapers, and then by electronic media which brought us radio, then TV and now the web. Now, it seems, we are headed back to a world without news. Not because the technology is not there, but rather because, increasingly, people are no longer interested in news, at least in the way it is packaged now.


What TV News Could Be
February 26, 2024

When television was invented in the 1930s, no one knew what TV news was supposed to look like. The medium had never existed before, and so, like Gutenberg half a millennium, prior, the first creators of TV news had to fall back on a medium with which they were familiar, and that was radio.


Maybe scary stories drive ratings… or maybe they don’t.


Share Page on: