Sina Weibo Breaks 250 Million Users, But How Many Are Real?

This morning, Sina’s (NASDAQ:SINA) quarterly earnings call revealed a few choice tidbits about Sina Weibo, the microblogging service that’s taken China’s internet by storm. On the call, Sina’s CEO Charles Chao revealed that the service now has more than 250 million users, which means that about half of the Chinese internet is on Sina Weibo. That’s crazy!

If you want more details from the earnings call, Bill Bishop (@niubi on Twitter) was all over it, livetweeting updates which he’s since helpfully collected and posted to his blog Digicha. You can go there to check it all out, but here are a few of the other tidbits that caught our eye:

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/niubi/status/134075289562120193″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/niubi/status/134088643173289986″]

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/niubi/status/134076476130725888″]

So Weibo has 250 million total users, and about 25 million daily active users, and the messages/day growth is slowing. With that many registered users, we wonder if perhaps they’re just reaching a sort of saturation point. We also wonder what percent of the 250 million registered users are zombies, and what percent are real (but infrequent) users. Bishop also tweeted that Sina has 300,000 verified users (users whose identities have been confirmed), which means the vast majority of their userbase isn’t verified.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re zombies; my own Sina Weibo account is unverified, as are most of my friends’. But a nationwide verification requirement — one of the methods people have been discussing as a possible response to the government for tighter microblog “management” — would still likely reduce Sina Weibo’s user count dramatically. Then again, their rival Tencent Weibo seems to be if anything even more filled with zombies, so a real-name requirement would hurt them, too.