WeChat may be king, but Weibo isn’t as dead as you think

We all know that WeChat is the hottest social media platform in China, and that’s been the case for some time. But has Sina Weibo, which was once the belle of China’s social media ball, fallen completely by the wayside? Maybe not. In fact, it might even be making a bit of a comeback.

That’s according to data from the Data Center of China Internet (DCCI), one of China’s top internet data trackers. In a new report on social media in 2015, DCCI shows that Weibo actually gained 38 million users over the course of the year. That’s nowhere near fast enough to catch WeChat, which gained 150 million users in 2015, but nevertheless, it’s still growth.

As you can see, QQ was technically the social platform with the most users in China as of the end of Q4 2015. But that may not be particularly meaningful, as QQ accounts are needed for all kinds of non-social-media related activities (like gaming on Tencent’s platforms) and as QQ’s numbers were shrinking by the end of the year anyway.

Weibo might be finding its own niche as a platform for open content distribution

WeChat is clearly the ascendant power, but Weibo also seems to have been making significant strides. By the final quarter of 2015 its quarterly growth rate (6.3 percent) wasn’t too far off from WeChat’s (7.2 percent), even if the absolute numbers paint the picture of a much larger gap.

Moreover, looking at three years of DCCI data shows that Weibo’s made a bit of a recovery. In 2013, 18.9 percent of China’s internet users were heavy Weibo users. In 2014, that dropped to 16.1 percent. But in 2015 it climbed back up to 18.4 percent, showing that even if the service hasn’t returned to the level of importance attained during its peak years, at least it’s heading in the right direction.

Make no mistake: Weibo isn’t the absolute-must-have app it was a few years ago, and it’s certainly not the absolute-must-have app that WeChat is today. But the data suggests that perhaps it’s not a case of one or the other, and that Weibo might be finding its own niche as a platform for open content distribution even as WeChat continues to grow its more closed, friends-circle based platform.