Sina Weibo hits 400m users, thanks Olympics

Sina Weibo is in rude health. The Chinese social network revealed that it had gone past the 400-million user mark thanks, in part, to the Olympic Games held in London earlier this year.

The announcement came as part of parent company Sina’s Q3 earnings report, which shows that Sina Weibo’s steadily making a mark for itself as a viable advertising platform.

“The London 2012 Olympic Games could very well be termed in China as the ‘social’ Olympics, pushing Weibo.com’s daily active users to a new record and Weibo’s registered accounts to surpass 400 million,” said Charles Chao, CEO and Chairman of Sina.

He also announced that the network would be exploring advertising for small and medium-sized social networks:

We are pleased with the initial results of Weibo monetisation, as advertising revenues doubled from the previous quarter and we started revenue sharing with application developers. We believe these new initiatives will help us reduce the impact of China’s weak macro-economic conditions. As we look forward into 2013, we are preparing to launch Weibo advertising solutions geared toward the small and medium-sized enterprise market, which will open up new opportunities for SINA advertising.

Sina reported revenues of US$152.4 million for the quarter, up from US$130-million during the same quarter last year. The bulk of that came from online advertising, which contributed around US$120.6-million, compared to US$101.0-million for the same period last year.

The company reckons that net revenues for the fourth quarter of 2012 will be between US$132-million and US$136-million, with advertising revenues to be between US$110-million and US$112-million, representing a year-over-year increase between six and eight percent.

While that amount of revenue signals good things for Sina, especially when it comes to its flagship social network, it should be noted that it gave no indication of how many of those users are actually active.