China Weibo Users Drop 9% as Tencent App Competition Grows
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Users of China’s Twitter-like microblogs fell for the first time amid challenges from new instant-messaging applications offered by Tencent Holdings Ltd. and a government crackdown on spreading rumors.
The number of users of Weibo, the Chinese version of microblogs, dropped 9 percent from a year earlier to 281 million at the end of 2013, according to a report published by China Internet Network Information Center. That marked the first decline in the platform use in figures dating back to 2010. The country had 618 million Internet customers as of Dec. 31, a 4.6 percent increase from the 591 million posted in June.