Wechat just reached a milestone of over 800 million monthly active users in Q2, up from 762 million in Q1. The data was disclosed by Tencent, the tech giant which owns Wechat, and reported by various Chinese news outlets. Along with the monthly users, Tencent grew in advertising sales revenue, reaching 6.5 billion yuan, a massive 60% jump. To put this in scale, it is equivalent to 39% of Baidu’s revenue.
Historically, the largest part of Tencent’s revenue came from online gaming, while the messenger platform failed to become profitable. But recently the situations has changed, with an increase in advertising especially on Wechat, both through user’s Moments as well as the official accounts.
Even though this data further cement Wechat as one of the strongest apps in China, one questions remains – Can Wechat grow even further? Certainly not in China, where virtually every person uses it already. The app failed to grown a strong user base in other countries, and it seems the efforts to promote it outside China have come to a halt, both at a marketing level (no more advertising) as well as technical level (no advanced features such as taxi hailing and shopping in international version). On the other hand, there is a strong potential for growth in advertisement revenue within China, and it is easy to predict more efforts to further promote such sales in the next quarters.
