Weibo’s Evolution from Public Debate to Commodification

The final speakers in this final session of AoIR 2018 are Lianrui Jia and Xiaofei Han, whose focus is on the changing politics of the major Chinese social media platform Weibo. It now has some 340 million users, and has a market capitalisation of US$13b. But Weibo remains significantly underresearched, and there are only a handful of major studies of the platform in the international literature to date.

Such literature has yet to reflect the full range of activities that take place on the platform. While the literature focusses largely on the political implications of Weibo, the platform provider in on record as being mainly interested in its monetisation – and even here the Western view does not sufficiently distinguish Weibo’s specificities from those of U.S.-based platforms.

The present study approached Weibo through a mixed-methods approach, and identified multiple phases of development. From 2009 to 2011, it was not yet a fully-fledged social media platform, but remain mainly designed as an information portal; here, issues such as rumours and misinformation were not seen as particularly problematic yet.

In 2012 to 2014, Weibo entered its ‘wild West’ phase: more social features were introduced, and this also benefitted its ability to marketise and monetise the platform – there were now native ads, value-added services popularity metrics, and features to find the most liked posts and comments, and Weibo became available through a native app on various mobile phone platforms. The platform also formed partnerships with Sina and Alibaba.

At the same time, the Chinese government also begun to crack down on the dissemination of rumours through the platform: it required real-name registrations, pursued users disseminating rumours, and introduced a user ‘credit score’ system that assigned penalty points for misbehaviours.

In the period from 2014 to 2017, Weibo became a publicly listed company, which also placed more financial reporting obligations on the company. There was extensive datafication on the platform, ranking celebrity users on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis and creating ‘superstar’ ranks for the most influential users (on metrics like viewership, interactions, search volume, and fan gifts sold). Fans could also access the superstars’ metrics, enabling them to orient themselves for future activities on the platform.

Datafication also became a critical mechanism for Weibo’s commodification: this included direct monetisation through virtual goods; network effects that sustained platform traffic and showed advertising potential; and marketer-friendly data assistants. Trending topics were more actively displayed, and Weibo sells advertising space on the trending topics list.

Weibo is now booming – but it has been turning into a billboard and has become less of a public space for Chinese Internet users. Political and social issues have all but disappeared from the platform, and entertainment content has taken over. This is in the interest of Weibo as a publicly listed company that does not want to be caught up in political controversies in China, and cannot make money from political debates in the same way that it can do so from entertainment fandom and advertising. This diminishes Weibo’s public function overall.