We’ve done an awful lot of talking about weibo real-name registration here at Tech in Asia, because it’s both interesting and important. But one thing we haven’t talked about is how Sina’s half-assed approach to the real name rules has affected how many people are actually using the site.
While it’s a far cry from having any official numbers, I’ve been tracking a few key metrics since late February. Now that real name registration, at least in its current iteration, has been in place for a while, I thought it might be useful to share these numbers.
I tracked five very simple statistics: the total number of posts about the top two trending topics on any given day, the posts-per-minute count for those same two trending topics, and for kicks, the posts-per-minute count for my own personal weibo feed. I recorded all five of these stats once each workday at 2:00 P.M., from late February through last week (although I missed a few days here and there when I happened to be away from a computer at 2:00).
Now, before we start, you should take these numbers with several grains of salt, for a bunch of reasons. First of all, I collected all this manually, so there’s a chance of human errors in the data, (as evidenced by the fact that I missed a couple days). Also, as the trending topics aren’t entirely automatic — Sina can and occasionally does artificially insert or delete topics from their list — looking at them might not really be representative of the overall discussion on weibo. But with very limited time, I figured these were good, simple things to track and if there was a huge drop-off in traffic, it ought to be evident even in this flawed data.
I’ve posted charts and my own conclusions below, but you can also click on the charts to view an interactive version or take in the raw data right here. You’ll note that in order to make the charts readable, I’ve had to toss out the numbers from a few days with extremely high post counts. For example, a topic about Tomb Sweeping Day on Tomb Sweeping Day was running at more than sixty posts-per-minute; it does not appear in the graph because including it would have made it difficult to actually see any trends that might exist on more “regular” days when counts are generally much lower.
Also, for reference, the real-name rules began going into sorta-effect on March 18, and seemed to be being rolled out gradually over the next few days, so that’s the point you want to look for to see if there’s a noticeable difference before or after it.
By Total Posts
How much are people saying about the hottest social media issue of the day? Would those numbers decrease after the real name rules went into effect? I measured the total posts for the top two trending topics at 2:00 PM each day, and here’s what I found:
Click to view an interactive version of this chart.
Click to view an interactive version of this chart.
Looking at these two charts, it’s difficult to see much of a pattern. There’s a definite downward slope in the number of total posts about the trending topic number two, but it isn’t mirrored in the results for number one, so it’s impossible to tell which is a more accurate depiction of what’s really happening. From the two of them, though, we can at least tell that there apparently hasn’t been a massive drop in traffic or usage, and the most interesting topics are still attracting huge numbers of posts.
Stay updated on the go with our mobile app.
Get latest insights with smoother, more personalized experience through TIA mobile app.
