Chinese Version of Twitter "Weibo" Has More Traffic Than the Original Twitter Social Network

When it comes to internet, China is in a world of its own. China has a very strict internet policy which restricts a lot of top internet giant such as Google, Facebook, YouTube etc. But the good thing is that while the Chinese government blocks this popular websites, they always make sure they create their own version or alternative.

Twitter is one of the blocked website and Weibo is the China version of Twitter. Weibo just announced recently that it had over 340 million monthly users as of march this year. This is actually 12 million more than what the original Twitter website had. 

Note that while Weibo's traffic comes mainly from China, Twitter is available in all but 3 countries around the globe. Twitter is also 3 years older than Weibo which was launched July of 2016. Also 47% of Chinese population are not even connected to the internet yet.

Weibo reported a healthy increase in year-on-year revenue in Q1. It generated $199.2 million in the first quarter of 2017, compared to $119.3 million for the same period in 2016. But in terms of revenue, Twitter actually did way better than its Chinese rival even though it had a year-on-year decrease in Q1. Twitter generated almost $600 million before April, 2016, while it managed to pull in $548 million in 2017.