Sina Weibo was by far the most popular Chinese micro-blogging service during the Olympics, recording twice as many Olympics-related messages from PCs during the games as Twitter did across all devices.
New data from Hitwise compares the four top Twitter-like competitors in China: Sina, Tencent, Sohu and Netease, Sina Tech reports (translation). It’s worth noting, though, that the figures only include PC traffic, so they don’t offer a complete picture of the micro-blog space. As of June 2012, just 32 percent of traffic on Sina Weibo came from PC users.
According to the report, Sina Weibo users sent a total of 390 million messages about the Olympics from PCs, as of August 13 at 8am. Earlier statistics released by Sina itself showed that 119 million messages were sent during the opening ceremony alone.
By comparison, Twitter announced that 150 million Olympics-related tweets were sent on its service during the games. The opening ceremony resulted in 9.66 million tweets. The comparison isn’t likely to be one-to-one, as it’s not clear whether Hitwise counted reposts and comments as separate messages.
The most discussed athletes on Chinese micro-blogs were swimmers Sun Yang and Ye Shiwen, hurdler Liu Xiang and gymnast Feng Zhe.
A measure of “residence time,” presumably the amount of time that users spent on the site, showed Sina had an even more impressive lead with a 70.6 percent share. Sohu took second with 14.2 percent, then Tencent with 13.1 percent and NetEase with just 2 percent.
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