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Weibo: The Shape of Things to Come?

Posted June 25, 2017
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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.

 

 


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Character-driven journalism is not new to newspapers, though it once was. It was once called The New Journalism in the 1960s — see Truman Capote or Tom Wolfe. Today it is industry standard. Why not take the Sopranos or Breaking Bad formula and marry it to TV journalism? (How many interviews have you seen in The Sopranos? How many Man on the Street soundbites have you seen in Breaking Bad?)


In a recent study by The Reuters Institute, 40% of Americans no longer watch or read the news at all. They find it too depressing. All doom and gloom.


There is a great deal of concern, well placed, that few people under the age of 30 watch TV news. Viewership of TV news in general has fallen off, so naturally, TV executives across the boards are searching for a solution. How to appeal to a demographic that spends most of their time on social media?


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