Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging platform in China, logged 119 million Olympics-related messages on the first day of the 2012 Olympic Games.
Nearly all posts came from China (114 million), with 2.4 million originating in the UK and 2.38 million from the US.
Sina Weibo’s official infographic estimates it would take a person 27 years of non-stop reading to get through all of the messages (The Next Web). The specific criteria for the 119 million posts were not named, but the number most likely includes retweets and comments.
Video viewing was extremely popular on the platform; Olympic videos from Sina racked up 49 million views.
How does this compare to Twitter? A direct comparison isn’t possible, since “the measuring methodologies for the two figures don’t match up” (The Next Web). But Twitter did see 9.66 million tweets during the opening ceremony. And within the first 24 hours of the games, Twitter surpassed the number of tweets sent in that same time frame during the 2008 games.
Overall, Olympic fans have been so prolific with tweets and text messages that officials have asked them to limit “non-urgent” messaging during events, in hopes of avoiding an overloaded network.
