China’s Weibo leverages star power to profit from huge youth following as oldies lose interest

Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like microblogging site which hosts accounts from most of the country’s celebrities, is now well positioned to cash in on the huge number of young people following star gossip on its platform, but that has come at the expense of older users who have left the site because it no longer fits their interests.

On Sunday, a post by a popular Chinese singer and actor paralysed the social media platform for an hour and a half as fans and internet users swarmed to the site. Lu Han’s news that he was now in a relationship with Chinese actress Guan Xiaotong was only online for 30 minutes before the crash happened. It took 90 minutes for Sina Weibo to get the site back up and running.

Within 24 hours, the post had been forwarded more than 870,000 times, receiving 2.2 million comments and 4.7 million “likes”.

However, not all Weibo users got caught up in the frenzy. Zhang Yi, a Shenzhen father in his mid-30s, did not hear the news until Sunday evening when some friends circulated it in a private WeChat posting.

“I have the Sina Weibo app on my mobile phone but rarely open it these days. There used to be some interesting accounts [on Weibo] that I followed closely, but many have either been shut down or stopped updating in the past few years,” he said.