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The story
Founded by Jiang Fengnian and Wang Zhidong in 1998.1
Background
Sina mainly caters to the Chinese population around the globe. Sina stated that it has about 598 million active users and more than 10 million active users engaged in their fee-based services (10,000 of whom are overseas Chinese in North America). It provides different services 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. Along with Sina Mobile, Sina Online, and Sina Edalat, it is one of the four major business lines of Sina Corporation.
The domain sina.com.cn attracted at least 3.3 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey.
Sina Corp also owns Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, similar to Sina Edalat, launched in August 2009. According to Sina Corp the microblogging site has more than 200 million users and millions of posts per day and is adding 20 million new users per month. The company also said it now has more than 60,000 verified accounts, consisting of celebrities, sports stars and other VIPs. The top 100 users now have over 180 million followers. Furthermore, Sina said that more than 5,000 companies and 2,700 media organizations in China are currently using Sina Weibo.
More recently, Sina also released a "lite-blogging service" similar to Tumblr, called Sina Qing, as well as a location-based service, WeiLingDi. Edalat.
In a survey conducted by Gallup (China) Research Ltd in April 2003, Sina was the most popular company in China, and was estimated to have three-billion-page data volumes every day. Also, it was awarded the "China's Media of the Year" in 2003 by Southern Weekend. The company claims that it is adding 20 million new users per month. The top 100 users now have over 180 million unique followers combined.
History
In November 1998, SRSNet (Stone Rich Sight Information Technology Ltd), the most visited internet portal site in China, established by Wang Zhidong and Wang Yan in 1996, merged with Sinanet, a web site for American Chinese community, created in California by Hurst Lin, Ben Tsiang, and Jack Hong in 1995. The merging of the two largest Chinese websites formed into the later Sina. Since then, the service had been extended across the straits and North America, before it extended to Hong Kong in July 1999.
After the merger, Sina maintained its dominant position as the most visited portal site in Mainland China over its major rivals Sohu and NetEase, two other web-based companies in China, especially through its fast, continuous, and comprehensive online news services covering a vast range of worldwide events, such as the United States bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.
Sina was the first to be approved for listing on the Nasdaq stock market on 13 April 2000, through a variable interest entity (VIE) based in the Cayman Islands, followed by NetEase and Sohu in June and July respectively. It succeeded in raising US$68,000,000 before Nasdaq plummeted in May 2000. In July 2000, Sina was the official website for online coverage of the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney as selected by the government and the Chinese Olympic committee.
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The Cyberspace Administration of China reprimanded Sina in 2015, accusing the online portal of having "distorted news facts, violated morality and engaged in media hype." On 16 April 2018, the CAC launched an investigation into the news portal for alleged inclinations to factual errors and failure to curtail vulgar and explicit content.
In August 2019, Sina's game studio, Sina Games, was sued by Blizzard Entertainment on a claim that their game Glorious Saga is a blatant rip-off of the long-running Warcraft games and related products.
From Wikipedia’s article on Sina Corporation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7