Their sole objective is to constantly improve user experience by optimizing current features and launching new functions. Wechat Design Division operates as a separate team in Tencent. Exhibit 4: First commercial post in “Moments” Tencent intends to acquire data from these two trails and design a feasible advertising model that guarantees perfect user experience. This one time post cost $1 million for BMW and any other following advertisers. Moments post – BMW became the 1st advertiser on Wechat’s moment (the most protected space from advertising) to post an ads combining words and pictures with a link for consumers to learn more. Some other brand spent $500,000 to get the contract. M&M’s didn’t pay anything to Tencent but reached the deal with resource exchange. 16 different M&M’s stickers were launched in Wechat as the first trial with 5 other brands. Finally, in 2015 it opened two ways of advertising for brands to take initial trial – Branded stickers and Moments post.īranded stickers – I personally led M&M’s Wechat sticker project. Meanwhile, the 1.1bn user base is so attractive that many companies and advertising agencies proposed creative ways to ask Wechat to open the advertising opportunity. Exhibit 2: Wechat Wallet Functionīefore 2015, Wechat was explicitly against any advertising on its platform to ensure the best-in-class user experience. However, with the huge base of consumers and rising transaction volumes, it’s foreseeable that third party revenue sharing will become a huge revenue source for Wechat without compromising any user experience. In order to attract more third party apps to cooperate to the platform, Wechat hasn’t charged any entry fee or negotiated revenue sharing contract with other apps. Currently Wechat already linked with third party websites with functions to order taxi, book flight tickets, shop on JD.com, pay utilities fee and reserve for hospital visits, etc. With the innovative function of Wallet, Wechat can virtually link with any third party apps to access numerous of functions. These services normally charge $0.99 for each purchase. Tencent launched sticker shop and game center in Wechat to provide value added services which are a key revenue source for Tencent’s another popular platform QQ. The majority of Wechat services are free to users. Particularly when Zhang saw the previous biggest social platforms fail largely due to excessive capitalization of users by advertising that jeopardized user experience, he decided to move very conservatively towards commercialization and would not be willing to sacrifice even a little bit of user experience. Wechat potentially has three major source of revenue – Value added service, O2O third-party revenue sharing, and advertising. Pathways to Just Digital Future Watch this tech inequality series featuring scholars, practitioners, & activists As Xiaolong Zhang – Wechat Devision Director in Tencent remarked, Wechat is not one app, it’s actually more than a hundred apps combined in a very organized and neat fashion with the ambition to become China’s largest mobile portal through which consumers can access everything in daily life. Its unique innovation and wide variety of features made it tremendously successful in China and took the other two seemingly unbeatable platforms Renren (Chinese equivalent of Facebook) and Weibo (Chinese version of Twitter) out of business. Wechat became the undisputable largest social platform in China. After that, Wechat thrived and continued to upgrade with new features including mobile wallet, gaming, O2O services and online market places.īy Q1 2015, Wechat achieved 1.1bn registered users, among which 46% claimed Wechat was the No.1 app in their life. In 2012, it upgraded with “Moments” – a major breakthrough which later developed to be the Chinese version of Facebook and Twitter combined with improved user experience such as no advertising and strong privacy. Wechat had a modest start only by featuring instant messaging but within a year, it added in more features of differentiation such as voice messaging and social functions such as “Finding People Nearby”. 26, 2011, the Chinese internet tycoon Tencent released its new mobile app Wechat in a highly competitive market.
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