People’s Sports and the Public Opinion Monitoring Room of the People's Daily Online published the 2016 China Marathon Transmission Report on March 20. The report analyses more than 2 million pieces of data from related news sites, BBS, blogs, newspapers, magazines, weibo, WeChat, APP and so on, summarizing transmission characteristics for the entire year.

Online discussion about Marathon was on the rise in 2016 and transmission on mobile terminals has been greater than on personal computers.

Young people are the main participants. Also, a growing number of elderly people have participated in Marathon, even breaking the age group records. As for gender, an increasing number of women have been participants.

The “Marathon Tourism Economy” has been formed in cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Xiamen, Dalian, and Guangzhou. As for spreading the news, short videos and VR have been used. On many occasions VR and aerial photography have been used for live broadcasts, and short videos used for publicity before the events.

The report also focuses on the use by Marathon of social media, and the result is not all it could be. For example, in the top 41 Marathon events, only 38 opened official WeChat accounts, amounting to only 92.67% of the total, of which only 28 were accepted for official certification.

Though Marathon showed good momentum in its development, there is still a lot of negative news around it. According to the report, there were 18 cases of incidents which caused widespread negative publicity in 2016. Among these 18 cases, ghost runners and improper organization accounted for the largest proportion, followed by faults of the organizing committees and even 2 cases of sudden death.

Source：People.cn

Proofread by Sean O Diobhilin