Sina had gone public on the Nasdaq in 2000.[6] In March 2014, Sina announced a spinoff of Weibo and filed an IPO under the symbol WB.[7][8] Sina carved out 11% of Weibo in the IPO, with Alibaba owning 32% post-IPO.[9] The company began trading publicly on 17 April 2014.[10] In March 2017, Sina launched Sina Weibo International Version. In November 2018, Sina Weibo suspended its registration function for minors under the age of 14. In July 2019, Sina Weibo announced that it would launch a two-month campaign to clean up pornographic and vulgar information, named "Project Deep Blue" (蔚蓝计划).[11] On 29 September 2020, the company announced it would go private again due to rising tensions between the US and China.
Weibo" (微博) is the Chinese word for "microblog". Sina Weibo launched its new domain name weibo.com on 7 April 2011, deactivating and redirecting from the old domain, t.sina.com.cn, to the new one. Due to its popularity, the media sometimes refers to the platform simply as "Weibo", despite the numerous other Chinese microblogging/weibo services including Tencent Weibo (腾讯微博), Sohu Weibo (搜狐微博), and NetEase Weibo (网易微博).[12] However, the latter three have stopped providing services.[13]
Sina Weibo is a platform based on fostering user relationships to share, disseminate, and receive information. Through the website or the mobile app, users can upload pictures and videos publicly for instant sharing, with other users being able to comment with text, pictures and videos, or use a multimedia instant messaging service. The company initially invited a large number of celebrities to join the platform at the beginning[14] and has since invited many media personalities, government departments, businesses and non-governmental organizations to open accounts for the purpose of publishing and communicating information.[15] To avoid the impersonation of celebrities, Sina Weibo uses verification symbols; celebrity accounts have an orange letter "V" and organizations' accounts have a blue letter "V". Sina Weibo has more than 500 million registered users;[16] out of these, 313 million are monthly active users, 85% use the Weibo mobile app, 70% are college-aged, 50.10% are male and 49.90% are female. There are over 100 million messages posted by users each day. With more than 100 million followers, actress Xie Na holds the record for the most followers on the platform. Despite fierce competition among Chinese social media platforms, Sina Weibo remains the most popular.[17
After the July 2009 Ürümqi riots, China shut down most domestic microblogging services, including Fanfou, the very first weibo service. Many popular non-China-based microblogging services like Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk have since been blocked. Sina Corporation CEO Charles Chao considered this to be an opportunity,[18][19] and on 14 August 2009, Sina launched the tested version of Sina Weibo.[20] Basic functions including message, private message, comment and reposting were made available that September. A Sina Weibo–compatible API platform for developing third-party applications was launched on 28 July 2010.[1]
On 1 December 2010, the website experienced an outage, which administrators later said was due to the ever-increasing numbers of users and posts.[21] Registered users surpassed 100 million in February 2011.[22] Since 23 March 2011, t.cn has been used as Sina Weibo's official shortened URL in lieu of sinaurl.cn. On 7 April 2011, weibo.com replaced t.sina.com.cn as the new main domain name used by the website. The official logo was also updated.[23] In June 2011, Sina announced an English-language version of Sina Weibo would be developed and launched, though content would still be governed by Chinese law.[24]
On 11 January 2013, Sina Weibo and Alibaba China (a subsidiary of Alibaba Group) signed a strategic cooperation agreement.[25]
With more and more foreign celebrities using Sina Weibo, language translation has become an urgent need for Chinese users who wish to communicate with their idols online, especially Korean. In January 2013, Sina Weibo and NetEase.com announced that they had reached a strategic cooperation agreement. When users browse foreign language content, they can now directly obtain translation results through the YouDao Dictionary.[26]
The Sina Weibo financial report in February 2013 showed that its total revenue was approximately US$66 million and that the number of registered users had exceeded the 500 million mark.
In April 2013, Sina officially announced that Sina Weibo had signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Alibaba.[27] The two sides conducted in-depth cooperation in areas such as user account interoperability, data exchange, online payment, and internet marketing. At the same time, Sina announced that Alibaba, through its wholly owned subsidiary, had purchased the preferred shares and common shares issued by Sina Weibo Company for US$586 million, which accounted for approximately 18% of Weibo's fully diluted and diluted total shares.[28]