Popularity of social media websites declining

As Facebook tries to win back young users from competitors around the world, a new report indicates that Chinese netizens' interest in social media has waned.

The report, released by the China Internet Network Information Center, showed that the number of Chinese social network users declined to 257 million by the end of June. Social network websites in China have lost 20.4 million users in the past six months.

The percentage of Chinese netizens visiting social websites dropped 4.3 percentage points compared with December.

In 2012, China had more than 400 million social network users, or one-third of the users around the world, according to People's Daily.

The network information center said it thinks the prospects for Chinese social network websites are not optimistic.

Part of the decline can be attributed to competition from social apps on mobile phones, the report said.

At the same time, social websites did not focus enough on their own operations, which led to fewer interactions among users, it added.

Even though social network websites are going out of fashion, the social element is still valued by other Internet companies.

(China Daily 07/22/2014 page5)