(Yicai Global) Feb. 27 -- Shares of Weibo, which runs China's Twitter-like micro-blogging platform Sina Weibo, slid after the internet giant reported its first-ever decline in quarterly revenue.

Weibo's stock price [NASDAQ:WB] ended 4.6 percent lower yesterday at USD41.39, after declining and gaining as much as 5.8 percent.

Revenue fell 3 percent to USD468.1 million in the last three months of 2019, the Beijing-based company said in an earnings report published yesterday. Net profit dropped 43 percent to USD95.1 million. For the whole year, net jumped 13.5 percent to USD494.7 million on a 3 percent upswing in revenue to USD1.77 billion.

Advertising and marketing accounted for almost 86.5 percent of revenue last year, up 2 percent from a year earlier to USD1.53 billion, the report said. Value-added services such as membership and live broadcasts brought in USD236.7 million for the year, a gain of 8 percent.

The outlook for the current first quarter remains uncertain due to the impact of the novel coronavirus outbreak, Weibo said in the report. Based on the company's best estimates, revenue is expected to drop by between 15 percent and 20 percent, it added.

Ad revenues fell 2.7 percent between October and December. Weibo has recently been accused of exaggerating the effectiveness of advertising by using fake traffic data.

Last October, an e-commerce business owner complained that he had paid a high price for advertising through a key opinion leader's vlog. Though the vlog got many replays, reposts, comments and likes, converted sales amounted to zero. That made him question the validity of the data provided by the KOL firm and Weibo.

His comments caused widespread public concern. Weibo has suspended the KOL account from receiving commercial orders, it said. The firm is looking into any evidence of data fraud and will get to the bottom of the dispute, it added.

Editors: Dou Shicong, Kim Taylor