新浪微博何时才能创收?

Sina has made its gaming platform free of charge for the first year. Even if it were to start charging, analysts' expectations are very low. This is partly because Sina's user base, which consists largely of white-collar workers in China's largest cities, "are not gamers", says Mr Dong of Analysys.

新浪的游戏平台第一年对用户免收费用。即便开始收费，分析师们的预期也很低。易观国际的董旭表示，部分原因在于，新浪的用户群以中国各大城市的白领为主，他们“不是游戏玩家”。 

That would leave Sina with advertising. The two main areas of potential here would be the country's soaring e-commerce market and highly targeted ads similar to those on Facebook. Many Chinese e-commerce sites have already linked up to Weibo, but Sina has yet to demand a revenue share for that.

这使得新浪必须依赖广告。两个具有潜力的主要领域将是中国蒸蒸日上的电子商务市场，以及类似于Facebook的具有高度针对性的广告。许多国内电子商务网站都和新浪建立了链接，但新浪尚未提出收入分成要求。 

The biggest disappointment for industry experts has been lack of progress in targeted ads.

最令行业专家失望的一点是，新浪在定向广告上进展甚微。 

"In theory, Sina has an incredible asset with all this user data, but they don't appear to know how to analyse those data," says a Beijing advertising agent.

一家北京的广告代理商表示，“在理论上，所有这些用户数据都是新浪的宝贵资产，但他们好像不懂得如何分析这些数据。” 

Despite healthy advertising demand in general, that weakness in reading the data impedes progress, especially in the current political climate. "Brands worry that they could be tied to re-tweeted messages that might be sensitive," says Barcap's Ms Yap.

尽管广告需求总体上保持稳健，但解读数据方面的弱点妨碍了新浪的发展，尤其是在当前的政治气候下。“各品牌担心，它们可能受到转发的敏感信息的牵连，”巴克莱资本的雅普表示。 

All these things are much less of a problem for Tencent. Although it has a microblog of its own, the Shenzhen-based company sees the service mostly as a tool to wear down Sina and make sure it does not challenge Tencent's lead in social networking in China.

对腾讯而言，所有这些都不算什么问题。尽管腾讯也推出了自己的微博，但这家总部位于深圳的公司主要把微博服务视为拖住新浪的一种工具，确保新浪不会挑战自己在中国社交网站领域的领先地位。 

Says a Tencent executive: "We have no plans to monetise our microblog. We don't need to."

一位腾讯高管表示：“我们还没有使微博商业化的计划。我们不需要这么做。”

译者:邢嵬