Estimating the Number of Posts in Sina Weibo

Sina Weibo, an online social network site, has gained popularity but lost it in recent years. Now we are still curious on the number of posts in Sina Weibo in its golden age. Besides checking this number in Sina's operating results, we aim to estimate and verify this number through measurement by using statistical techniques. Existing approaches on measurement always rely on the supported streaming application programming interface (API) which provides proportional sampling. However no such API is available for Sina Weibo. Instead, Sina provides a public timeline API which provides non-proportional sampling but always returns a (nearly) fixed number of samples. In this paper, we present a novel method utilizing this API and estimate the number of posts in Sina Weibo in its golden age.