Microblogging site Sina Weibo — China’s version of Twitter — is past its prime, as its leading users are publishing fewer articles every day, an analyst has told Shanghai’s First Financial Daily.
Yu Xiao, a graduate student at the Harbin Institute of Technology, told the newspaper that according to data released by international website traffic monitor Alexa, traffic to Weibo.com plateaued in August and the number of pages viewed by its users began dropping in September.
In November, the amount of time Weibo users spent on the site was down 33% compared to July.
Yu’s views were shared by a Weibo user, who said most stories on the personal microblogs of social media celebrities were boring gossip.
Although Sina says Weibo has 250 million registered users, search giant Baidu says the number of visitors to Weibo began declining from July, when it started using a new version.
Yu estimates that only 16% of Weibo’s registered users are active microbloggers. To inflate the number of their followers, some celebrities and organizations have purchased fake followers, also known as corpse followers, for their microblogs, said Yu.
via Weibo traffic down｜Companies｜Business｜WantChinaTimes.com.