Sina.com

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Sina.com
Image:Sinalogo1.gif
URL http://www.sina.com
Type of site news and entertainment
Owner SINA Corporation
Created by SINA Corporation

Sina.com is the largest Chinese-language infotainment web portal. It is run by SINA Corporation (新浪) which was founded in 1999. The company was founded in Mainland China, and its global financial headquarters have been based in Shanghai since October 1, 2001.

Contents

[edit] Background

[edit] Business coverage

As a website that mainly caters for the Chinese population around the globe, SINA claimed that it has about 94.8 million registered users and more than 10 million active users engaged in their fee-based services (10,000 of whom are overseas Chinese in North America). SINA.com provides different subsidiary sites around the world, for example there are 13 access points within Greater China, and subsidiary tailored pages for overseas Chinese, which include SINA US, SINA Japan, SINA Korea, SINA Australia, SINA Europe and SINA Germany.

SINA.com is one of the four major business lines of SINA Corporation (NASDAQ: SINA). The rest of the major business lines are SINA Mobile, SINA Online and SINA.net.

The domain sina.com.cn attracted at least 3.3 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey.

[edit] Popularity

In a survey conducted by Gallup (China) Research Ltd in April 2003, SINA was the most popular website in China. It is estimated that the site has about 3 billion page views every day. Also, it was awarded the 'Chinese Language Media of the Year' in 2003 by the Nanfang Weekend[1]

As of May 12, 2007, according to Alexa.com, Sina.com.cn was 13th in terms of Top Site rankings [2] and 3rd in terms of Traffic Rank within China [3]

[edit] History

(Information based on Xin, 2002)[4]

In March 1999, Stone Rich Sight Information Technology Ltd (SRS), established by SINA.com's former CEO and President Wang Zhidong, merged with SINANET.com, a US website company of Sunnyvale, California. The merging of the two largest Chinese websites formed into the later SINA.com. Since then the service had been extended across the straits and North America, before it extended to Hong Kong in July 1999.

SINA.com overtook the dominant role of Sohu.com for the first time in 1999 by its fast, continuous, and comprehensive reports on the NATO Bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, according to CNNIC's survey conducted 2 months after the incident ([1], Xin, 2002).

SINA.com was the first to be approved for listing on the Nasdaq National market on 13 April 2000, followed by Netease and Sohu, two other web-based companies in China, in June and July respectively. It succeeded in raising US$68,000,000 before Nasdaq plummeted in May 2000. In July 2000, SINA.com was the official website for on-line coverage of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney as selected by the government and the Chinese Olympic committee. (Xin, 2002).

[edit] Management

[edit] Key Officers

  • Mr. Charles Chao: Chief Executive Officer and President. He received his Master of Professional Accounting from University of Texas in Austin, TX. and holds an MA degree in Journalism from University of Oklahoma.
  • Mr. Herman Yu: Acting Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Yu holds a Masters of Accountancy from the University of Southern California and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics with Honors from the University of California.
  • Mr. Hurst Lin: Chief Operating Officer. He received his MBA from Stanford University and holds a bachelor's degree in Electronic Engineering from Dartmouth College.
  • Mr. LC Chang: Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. He received his Executive MBA from National Taiwan University.
  • Mr. Sina Jahankhani: Executive worker for Sina Corporation.
  • Dr. Arash Ehteshami: VP of External Affairs and Public Relations (PR)

[Source: http://corp.sina.com.cn/eng/sina_mng_eng.htm]

[edit] Partnership

Sina.com cooperates with other web-based companies such as People, Nanfang Daily, Lifeweek and Xinhuanet, etc. Apart from the media partners, its clients include Microsoft, DELL, IBM, Motorola, and Kodak. Recently SINA.com started developing its business in the field of wireless internet, in the meantime collaborating with China Mobile, China Telecom, Ericsson.

Recently SINA.com and Yahoo.com started to jointly provide online auction services in China; in response to this, EachNet (Chinese: "易趣網"), which cooperates with eBay, lowered its registration fee in early February 2004 in order to keep its market share.(Source: Beijing Entertainment News; EachNet's announcement)

[edit] Marketing

To provide tailored internet services for local people, SINA.com has been conducting quantitative and qualitative marketing researches, including demographic research, psychograph, etc., on target audience in specific regions.

SINA.com's business status has been demonstrated in some reviews. In fact, many people were stunned to know the positive impact of SARS on SINA.com. While other businesses were heavily struck by the SARS, Sina was, and has been, thriving. For instance, based on the First Quarter 2003 Financial Report of Sina.com, the net revenues were 41% over the same period in 2002. By July 2003, SINA.com has 421 online advertisers. Though, this number remained stagnant during the SARS outbreak, their advertising budget were mounting higher. Also, owing to the fear against SARS, people stayed, much of their time, at home and surfed on the net, boosting the online advertising and the use of short message services (SMS). SMS then became a proven cash-cow for Internet portals.

[edit] Features

[edit] Multiple services

Sina.com provides internet services to the Chinese population around the world. In every localized website, there are over thirty integrated channels, including news, sports, technology information, finance, advertising services, entertainment, fashion, and travel.

Sina.com is a multiple-service provider, its major services are:

Sina Blog (中文:新浪博客) is the blog service of Sina.com, which features the blogs of celebrities,including the most popular blog in the world, the one of Xu Jinglei.

[edit] Local content

Internationalized services have a common layout which consists of sections like news, information, infotainment and email services with localized content.

Localization involves political censorship. As with all internet content providers operating within Mainland China, the web pages which are geared toward Mainland China audiences have big mamas which censor the discussion for sensitive political content. In addition, the news from sina.com comes from local newspapers, which in the case of Mainland China are themselves subject to censorship by the government. This censorship does not extend to pages and forums which are not intended for audiences within Mainland China.

[edit] Online News

Sina.com provides a lot of feature news as the focus of the lead story or the main photo. On the other hand its domestic political news is sourced from The People’s Daily or Xinhua News Agency. Compared to conventional medium for news distribution, Sina.com is a platform for news articles from the traditional media. That means, according to its CEO, Wang Zhidong, Sina.com would never hire journalists (Xin, 2000).

[edit] Network technology

According to the company's published information, SINA.comXpressTM and SINA.comPlusTM are Sina.com's two main exclusive technologies, which bring ease-of-use benefits and enable the audience of Big5 (traditional Chinese character), and GB (simplified Chinese characters) to view the webpages sourced from around the Chinese communities of the world. [Source: About SINA.com]

[edit] Prospects

  • According to CNNIC's report, by the end of 2003, the number of broadband users had reached more than 17 million in China, with an increase of 77.6% over 1997. Broadband can better meet the entertainment demands of the audience with the advantage of offering superior sensory experience. In the USA, Microsoft, AOL, and MSN have begun their business on broadband in succession. In China, some websites basing on broadband have been set up such as 互联星空（pinyin:Hu Lian Xing Kong; Chinavnet) and 天天在线（pinyin:Tian Tian Zai Xian; 116.com). By the contrast, the websites basing on narrowband, including Sina.com, will face a big challenge. [Source:Xinhuanet]
  • According to 新京报(pinyin: Xin Jing Bao), SINA will continue to develop in various fields, but the main orientation is the internet, which is the focus in management of the corporation. On the other hand, some important fields such as music, broadband, and Search engines, won't be ignored.

[edit] Publication

[edit] References

  1. ^ nanfangdaily.com.cn (Chinese).
  2. ^ sina.com.cn, alexa.com
  3. ^ top sites:China, alexa.com.
  4. ^ Xin, H. (2002). The Surfer-in-chief and the would-be kings of content - a short study of Sina.com and Netease.com. In S. H. Donald., M. Keane. & Y. Hong. (eds.). Media in China: consumption, content and crisis. London: Routledge.

[edit] External links