Majority of Weibo users to be verified by Friday: Sina

Sina Corp, the operator of the country's largest Internet portal, said it expects 60 percent of the subscribers to its microblog service will have their real names registered by Friday, in line with the government's requirement.

"The 60 percent Sina Weibo users, who would have successfully verified their Weibo identities by the deadline, include both new registered users and old subscribers," Liu Qi, a spokesman for the NASDAQ-listed company, told the Global Times Monday.

While the real-name requirement would impact new user growth for the moment, it is unlikely to affect the business in the long term, Liu believes.

A spokesperson for Tencent Weibo, another major microblogging platform in China, declined to disclose the expected verification rate when reached by the Global Times Monday.

"What we can say now is that we have complied with the government regulations," said the spokesperson, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The user activity has slightly declined owing to the government's requirement for verifying registration, Cao Guowei, chief executive of Sina, said on a fourth-quarter earnings call in late February.

There are over 300 million registered users of Sina Weibo, with 9 percent being daily active users, Sina Corp said.

Tencent Weibo had 310 million registered users as of the end of the third quarter last year, according to the latest available data from Hong Kong-listed Tencent Holding, the operator of Tencent Weibo.

Due to the vast number of microblog users, the government has intensified supervision over the country's popular microblogging platforms, issuing rules in December to require microblog operators to ensure real-name registration of its users by Friday.

Market watchers are not too concerned over the real-name registration requirement.

"The real-name registration would certainly heighten the nervousness of the potential new registered users and have an impact on user activity, but it won't be a deadly impact," said Cao Junbo, chief analyst at Beijing-based Internet consulting firm iResearch.

"Growth in Weibo users would be affected consequently, but the verification is not expected to sink the industry," said Dong Xu, an industry analyst at market research firm Analysys International.

Meanwhile, Weibo has seen high penetration among the country's Internet population, and the booming growth seen over the past two years is unlikely to continue, Dong said.