China’s internet is littered with companies that thrive in part thanks to the country’s strict censorship. Baidu, Weibo, and Youku are now web giants due to blocks put in place on Google, Twitter, and Youtube.
The popular western photo sharing social network Instagram has eluded the Great Firewall until recently, operating freely and successfully in the Middle Kingdom. But the site and app became inaccessible from China starting near the end of September this year, likely due to the ongoing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong that earned the ire of Beijing officials. Nearly a month later, Instagram is still blocked due to users posting “sensitive” content, and there’s a good chance it might never be unblocked.
Instagram was allowed to operate in China a relatively long time, and no domestic rivals really stood out as the market leader. Instagram has never revealed its user numbers for China, but the company did disclose at one point in 2011 that it was seeing 100,000 downloads per week. In short, Instagram was popular.
With the prospect of one of the country’s favorite photo sharing app never making a comeback, what will fill the void? Around the same time that Instagram teased its download numbers in 2011, we wrote a list of the five best photo-sharing apps in China. Only a couple of those – TuDing and Baidu-owned PhotoWonder – still show signs of life today, and none have really caught on.
The most popular alternative Instagram-y app in China for a time was probably Papa, which lets users add short audio clips to the mix. The latest numbers we found showed the app had about seven million monthly active users in mid 2013, but reports from this year say that number fell below one million. Tuding and Vida seem to have fallen by the wayside as well.
So Instagram successfully kept the competition in China at bay, but how long until we see either a resurgence from one of these older apps or a completely new player enter the space and take over where it left off? So far, it doesn’t seem to be happening. Tech in Asia contacted Baidu to ask whether it saw any rise in downloads for PhotoWonder since Instagram was blocked, and the answer was a clear “no”. A search on App Annie shows none of the aforementioned apps have seen any significant increase in the past month.
A market demand doesn’t just disappear due to a government block. Users could be biding their time and expecting Instagram to be uncensored. But a more likely explanation is that they’re posting their photos to WeChat, instead.
China’s behemoth messaging app that spans gaming, payments, and blogging also touts a simple set of photo editing tools, stickers, and filters for pictures posted on users’ Facebook Wall-style Moments feed via a companion app called StoryCam. StoryCam and WeChat might not be a frame-for-frame replacement for Instagram, but many photo junkies can use it to get their fix.
Then again, maybe Instagram’s popularity in China isn’t just about its features and functions. Social networks are about people, and China has largely been cut off from the rest of the world when it comes to social media for a long time. Instagram was an exception to that rule, and no other photo app today – Chinese or not – is really capable of emulating that global human element.
Instagram has been blocked in China for a month. What will take its place?
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