This article was published on August 9, 2012

Picture this: Chinese Internet giant Tencent’s Qzone social network now hosts over 150 billion photos


Picture this: Chinese Internet giant Tencent’s Qzone social network now hosts over 150 billion photos

Chinese Internet giant Tencent claims its Qzone social network now hosts 150 billion photos, enough to encircle the earth and the moon 30 times if printed out.

Qzone, an offshoot of the popular QQ messaging service, is roughly the Chinese equivalent of Facebook or Myspace. According to one estimate from May, Qzone has more than 530 million users.

A new infographic from the company (via Techweb) offers details on the photo habits of its users. The average number of daily photo uploads now stands at 200 million, though Qzone’s single-day record is 360 million uploads. The 21-30 age group is the most active at uploading, accounting for more than 40 percent of photos.

40 percent of photos were made available to the public, while 13 percent were shown to friends only. 24 percent of shots were uploaded for personal viewing and 23 percent required that a question be answered first.

Mobile photos now make up the majority of Qzone’s uploads at 53 percent. Point-and-shoots were behind 25 percent of images, while SLR cameras represented 22 percent.

Though the number of photos on Qzone is impressive, it’s still presumably less than that of Facebook. Last August, Facebook revealed that it was seeing 100 million photo uploads a day. Some estimates put the company’s total at 100 billion last year.

Flickr hit 6 billion last year, while newcomer Instagram is believed to have reached 1 billion earlier this year, up from 400 million at the end of 2011.

With more than 700 million users on its QQ service, Tencent is a household name in China. Last year, the company released a QQ Login feature similar to Facebook Connect. The company has also developed a QQ Open Platform with a proprietary desktop interface and support for third-party applications.

Images via Flickr / faykwong, Tencent

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