Tencent Weibo Breaks 300 Million Users, But How Many Are Real?

Zombies! (via The Walking Dead)

Tencent (HKG:0700) announced their unaudited Q3 financials today, and just like Sina’s, those announcements were paired with some pretty impressive statistics. So impressive, in fact, that a suspicious person might suspect they were inflated. Not I, of course, but a person more suspicious than I!

For example, its Weibo service, Tencent Weibo, has over 300 million users now, which means that if each user is a real person, more than half of China’s internet is on Tencent Weibo. Of course, what the number actually reflects is registered users, including zombies, spambots, and anyone with a QQ account who once clicked an “open a microblog” button to see what the fuss was about. But it’s still impressive!

From there, we move on to the Qzone numbers. Qzone is Tencent QQ’s social networking/profile-building site, and according to their latest stats, it has 536 million active users. Assuming one account per person, that means that every single Chinese person on the internet maintains an active Qzone account, and then in addition to those people, 36,000,000 people maintain active Qzone accounts without accessing the internet!

Now, of course, it’s possible to have multiple accounts, but even so, I’ve got to call bull on this one. There must be an awful lot of spam and zombie action here too. Qzone is popular, sure, but it’s not that ubiquitous.

But that’s nothing compared to the numbers from QQ, Tencent’s IM service, which apparently boasts over 700 million active accounts. This actually strikes me as more believable because QQ is completely ubiquitous and can be accessed by most phones in China, even phones with no 3G or “real” internet access. (Case in point, back in 2007 I owned a 300 RMB Nokia phone, the cheapest phone in the mall I bought it at, and even that supported QQ). Additionally, plenty of people have multiple QQ accounts (for personal and work use, for example), so it’s not as much of a stretch to imagine 700 million active accounts, if not 700 million individual users.

But yeah, overall, we’d say take these stats with a few helpings of salt. On the other hand, Tencent made a $760 million profit this quarter, so I suspect they don’t care about our skepticism, or anyone else’s, and are laughing their way to the bank.

[Tencent Full Press Release]