NetEase Weibo

» see t.163.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed netease weibo entirely. by 2010 when it launched i had zero contact with the chinese social internet. unlike sina weibo, which occasionally surfaced in english press coverage of chinese politics, netease's version was strictly a domestic product that got mentioned mostly as an "and also" in the same articles. i learned it existed the way most non-chinese readers did, from tech-press comparison charts of the "four weibos" in 2012 and 2013.

netease launched t.163.com in the spring of 2010. the parent site 163.com had been one of china's top web portals for over a decade with news coverage and its own online gaming operation. adding a microblog was a defensive move against sina, which had launched weibo in august 2009 and was already pulling ahead of the field. netease pushed the service hard through 2010 and 2011, promoted it across the portal's front page. by may 2012 the company was claiming 120 million registered accounts.

the number was mostly a paper figure. registered accounts on a chinese portal in that period could be created almost automatically for anyone with a netease email, so it was less a measure of active users than a signal of how much reach netease's own portal could drive. the actual daily active number was never disclosed at similar scale. sina had the celebrities plus the news cycle. netease sat in third or fourth position on real engagement, depending on the quarter you asked about.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the four weibos ~

china's microblog era ran roughly from 2009 to 2013 as a four-way race between sina, tencent, sohu and netease. sina had the head start plus the celebrity accounts. tencent had the qq signup pipeline that gave its version the largest paper user base. sohu and netease were the smaller portals trying to defend a slice of their existing user attention against the specialized microblog platforms. netease was the last of the four to launch and the first of the four to close down.

~ how it actually ended ~

netease posted a notice on 5 november 2014 announcing the shutdown. current users were told they would be moved onto lofter, the company's tumblr-clone platform which had launched earlier that year. the transition was structured as a soft migration inside the netease account system. the microblog product name was retired. the servers behind t.163.com went off shortly after, well ahead of tencent's own weibo closure six years later.

~ what remains ~

the microblog category in china had already peaked by 2013. sina weibo was still growing but the whole shape was moving to wechat's messaging plus moments feed. netease's move to consolidate onto lofter was a quiet way to close the microblog operation without a formal wake. the 120 million registered accounts became lofter accounts, most of which never opened the new product. lofter itself is still online in a small way, hosting fandom communities on the netease side of chinese social media.

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