On Youku:
The above 55 second advertisement featuring famous female Chinese tennis player Li Na is currently ranked as one of the most viewed videos on popular Chinese video-sharing website Youku, with over 400 thousand views and 3000 comments since it was uploaded 2 days ago. Li Na is best known for being the first player from an Asian country to appear and win a Grand Slam singles final with her appearances in this year’s Australian Open and French Open.
However, it is clear that most of the views and comments on this video are fake, artificially inflated by unnamed marketing organizations using fake profiles to promote a video onto Youku’s various popularity charts (in this case, the “most viewed” and “most commented” rankings). A large amount of the comments range from empty statements…
不见冬瓜:
[I] like Li Na and [I] also like Li Na’s weibo.
北阳大道:
Li Na, jia you! Li Na, jia you!
…to shameless self-promotion…
记分卡的:
Weibo is my choice~.
减肥猫米:
Weibo is my favorite.
…to the simply ridiculous…
凤凰美:
The action was captured so awesomely!
打嘛不还:
This kind of cartoon is the kind of cartoon I most like to watch.
Sina Weibo is the dominant microblogging service in China. “Weibo” is the Chinese term for “microblog” itself and when most Chinese including the media use the term “weibo” by itself, they are referring to Sina Weibo. Sina also owns the weibo.com domain name. Their dominance forces competitors like Tencent, the makers of China’s popular QQ instant messaging service and social network, to specify “Tencent Weibo” when referring to their own competing microblog service.
Therefore, it is unfortunate that Sina has created such a embarrassing marketing campaign, and resorted to using such obvious and low-class marketing tricks to get people to watch its video.
Poor Li Na.
