This time I want to talk about the advertisements and commercials in the first page of weibo account. In the front page of every user’s account, there is always a flash column which usually contains three to five advertisements for merchandise or activities. Since I never see these kinds of ads or commercials on Twitter, I believe weibo is operated more commercialized than Twitter. And the following I will make some description of the content of ads by using yesterday’s ads as examples.
The first advertisement is for a hot topic on weibo at that time—UEFA Champions League, Milan Football Club VS. F.C. Barcelona (Figure 1). This advertisement is to invite users talking about this game. By clicking the advertisement, users are leaded to a specific page which includes the introduction of this hot topic and tweets written by other users and marked by hash tag.
Figure 1Yesterday’s second advertisement is for hint fiction competition (Figure 2). In the first half year of this year, weibo organized a hint/macro fiction competition which achieved great success. So in the second half year, it is organizing it again. In this competition, users need to create a story in 140 words according to the limit number of words by weibo. All the weibo users can vote for their favorite stories during a certain period of time. At the end, the authors of first 100 novels will get rewards from weibo.
Figure 2The third advertisement is about Beijing government offices create weibo accounts for publishing news (Figure 3). From my point of view, there is really a big development for Chinese government using social media to contact with individuals. The forth one is also for a hot topic—Golden Horse Awards of Movies in Taiwan (Figure 4). Weibo invites users getting involved talking about it and guessing which movies will win awards. The fifth advertisement is about a new weibo badge available now.
Figure 3
Figure 4Coincidentally, all these five ads were not for commercial. They were all for activities in weibo. However, in some other days, there are commercial ads for particular products or brands. Weibo does go further in the commercialization way.
Nice post. Well, I am a new user of Weibo, Chinese version Twitter. After using Weibo for over a month, I want to say that Weibo is much better than Twitter for its way to operate, function and entertainment. Weibo has all the functions that Twitter have, but what Weibo has yet Twitter doesn't have are video sharing functions, various emotion faces installment, group and games. As for the advertising on Weibo,I think that is a pretty common phenomenon on social media, since most social media are open to the public for free. One way for them to make money is posting advertising. I understand too many ads can be really annoying, but that is one thing we need to put up with when we enjoy a free social media site.
ReplyDeleteIt's very interesting how weibo combines self advertisement and external advertisement in its ads. the ads seem larger and more clunky than U.S. users would tolerate. I may be wrong, maybe it's because Americans have been exposed to advertising arguably for longer and more ubiquitously but it seems we tolerate a lot less direct marketing and prefer viral or subtle advertising. Do you think this is true? Would weibo the way it is be successful in English in America? Hope you had a good semester Fan, good luck next year!
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