BEIJING - Many fans of Chen Chia-hwa, a singer in the Taiwan girl pop group S.H.E. who also goes by the name Ella Chen, stayed up all night bleary-eyed on July 23 watching the number of Chen's microblog followers plummet.
"The total number of our baby Ella's microblog followers dropped from around 440,000 in the early morning of July 23 to 376,611 the next evening," said Wang Ying, one of Chen's legion of fans.
How did Chen get so unpopular so quickly? they asked. Angry fans called sina.com's customer service hotline during the all-nighter and begged for an answer.
"They told us they removed some fake followers who were registered on the same IP address but have hardly posted a thing on the microblog," Wang said.
Chen isn't the only celebrity who has been caught up in Sina's crackdown of imaginary followers. Singers such as Zhou Bichang and Han Geng have also experienced a drop off in followers overnight.
Microblogs have gained in status in China as the trendiest social networking system during the past 12 months, with more than 20 million users opening their microblogs on sina.com, China's leading website. A microblog is different from a blog in several ways: The content is smaller and a microblog entry is usually a short sentence, image or embedded video. Think of Twitter but with more options.
A microblog user can choose to become the follower of other users.
The number of followers of the top 100 microbloggers on the popular site sina.com, according to a report from the Credit Suisse Group in August, reached 67.9 million by the end of July.
Many Chinese enterprises have caught onto the potential of e-marketing in microblogs after seeing how Twitter raised nearly $6.5 million after it launched in June 2006.
"People judge the influence of a microblog account by the number of its followers. With more influence comes more economic value," said Xiong Wei, president of think tank China Labs.
Any microblog that has at least 10,000 followers is qualified to post ads and thus reap profits, according to a recent report by the Economic Observer.
But the occurrence of "zombie followers" on blogs to gain the impression of popularity may not be a secret in China but uncovering a large number of them in a short period is. Sina was somehow able to remove a dozen of them under a second on Chen's blog.
In the rush to seem popular, the business of selling imaginary followers on taobao.com, the largest online consumer-to-consumer trading platform in China, has blossomed.
Searching for "microglog followers" on the website results in approximately 208 tradable commodities and 18 online shops.
"When you have more than 1,000 fans, you are a notice board. When you get more than 100,000 fans, you are a metropolitan newspaper. And with 10,000,000 fans, you can compete with China Central Television!" reads an advertisement used by shops trading in microblog followers.
Fake followers are priced at around 0.2 yuan each, which usually adds up to 10 followers per yuan at the wholesale price.
But as supervision has stepped up on zombie followers, the trade has not surprisingly found a way around the major obstacle.
Nearly every online shop has claimed that they sell "high-quality eternal" microblog followers who have their own individual photos, their own followers and microblogs. Even their microblog messages are updated from time to time.
"They are nothing like zombie followers. There's no way they can be uncovered. We will give you a new one if any of them got deleted," said a shop owner nicknamed Mao Mao.
She said that all the followers' microblog accounts in her shop are created individually. She also said that she personally adds the followers to the customer's account.
"You can buy 138 high-quality followers but we have another 100 who don't have pictures and info if you need them urgently," she said.
Mao Mao, according to her site, earned around 1,000 yuan over a 30-day period recently, quite a feat since she just started selling fake followers.
Unlike Mao Mao who only sells microblog followers, many online shop owners have expanded their services to a new territory. "Twenty-eight yuan can buy you 50 comments for your own microblog," a shop owner registered under the name Chou Chou_happy said.
Chou Chou_happy also provides a package service at her shop. A thousand followers plus 20 comments plus 400 tweets is priced at 229 yuan. Fifteen hundred followers plus 10 comments plus 500 tweets can be bought at 258 yuan. There's no maximum limit in her shop but Chouchou_happy refused to reveal the secret of her business.
"You just order whatever you want and give us the link to your microblog, we will handle the rest for you," she said.
The website of her online shop shows that Chou Chou_happy sold 259 of the 229-yuan packages to two customers on July 26-27, which netted her 59,311 yuan in cash and 259,000 fake microblog followers on the Internet.
Many shop owners are aware that they are doing something they can't really be proud of. Most of the five online shop owners contacted by China Daily refused to reveal the source of their massive followers and the identity of their customers.
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Chen Bing, an IT expert who has successfully developed a software which can hasten the registration procedure of microblog accounts, pointed out that the target clients of his software are online shop owners who make a living on selling fake followers and those who want to be famous.
Chen, who went into the IT industry a decade ago, smelled success in the business of dealing microblog followers ever since the t.sina.com.cn microblog was set up last August.
"It is just like when blogs are hot, some people would like to pay in order to keep a high click rate," he said. His software has been downloaded nearly 3,000 times after it was released on July 2.