Earnings: Sina's Q2 Profits Rise; Blog Revenues At About $1 Million; Olympics Alliance Confusion

Chinese Internet portal operator Sina (Nasdaq: SINA) reported its Q2 numbers tonight, and its Q2 profits rose more than 38 percent, due to a jump in online ad revenues. The company reported net income of $14.5 million, compared with $10.4 million last year. Revenues rose to $59.8 million from $53.7 million in the year-ago period. Non-advertising (primarily mobile) revenues decreased 23 percent year over year to $18.6 million.

From conference call: On the company’s blog monetization strategy: We started to place more advertising on the blog pages, not in the personal blog but on the front page of blogs…I think the total amount was probably around $1 million US in Q2. Particularly we saw a trend in dealing with Olympic sponsors these days that we saw a lot of demand for our blogs, I mean participation in the Olympics campaign.

On confusion about Olympic online advertising (since Sohu is the official news provider for Olympics), and the Olympics alliance: Our understanding from our communication with IOC directly is that there will be no restrictions in terms of using logos on the website and going forward in China. I think there was a lot of complicated history on this particular issue, but part of the objective of this Olympic Alliance is to send a statement to the market and to the audience here in China that there will be no such thing called exclusivity on the reporting of Olympic Games and there will be no such thing called exclusivity on advertising on a website in China for Olympic Games…This is an issue that a lot of people are confused about, and I agree some advertisers are also confused, so we need to get the clarification and we are in the process of getting a written clarification from IOC but that’s our understanding now from the oral communication with the IOC.

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