'Public accounts' losing allure on social media

Last week a friend of mine who was attending a training course posted a message on WeChat: "What a boring lecture! The only benefit was I finally had time glancing through more than 60 unread articles on public accounts during the lecture."

Public accounts, similar to a blogging platform which enables users to push feeds to subscribers, were born in August 2012 on WeChat, China's most popular mobile message app. More than 8 million public accounts were created in the following less than two and one half years, which means nearly 9,000 public accounts were born every day.

Nearly 80 percent of WeChat users subscribe to public accounts, according to a survey jointly released in April by Tencent Holdings Ltd, which operates WeChat, and the China Academy of Telecommunication Research.