Chinese Digital Year In Review 2016

Thomas Graziani New WeChat features

2016 is drawing to an end. Here is Chinese digital year in review 2016. 2016 is the year of live streaming Uber China lost the war against Chinese taxi hailing company Didi. Apple’s iPhone market share drops to 7%. WeChat fails to expand to international market. WeChat and Alibaba had another red envelope war during the Chinese new year Chinese …

Are Weibo shops the future of social e-commerce in China?

Thomas Graziani New WeChat features

Weibo is dead? That’s the most common misconception in social media in China. Weibo has been showing very healthy signs of growth as of Q3 2016: MAU grew 34% year-over-year! So, who are the largest accounts on Weibo, and how did they do it? Let’s have a look! Weibo as an e-commerce platform Everyone heard about WeChat Pay, WeChat shops …

Case study of Uncle Tongdao: 3 years, 5 million WeChat followers, and 300m RMB valuation

Tingyi Chen WeChat guides & tips, WeChat news

Uncle Tongdao, a WeChat Official Account about astrology just had an exit at a RMB 300 million valuation. The founder and ex-CEO, Cai, Yuedong cashed RMB 217 million ($31.42million) for his 72.5% share. Meisheng Culture is the investor. How can a WeChat Official Account be worth that much? Turns out, saying Uncle Tongdao is a WeChat Official Account is a huge under …

“We were wrong”, Alipay apologies for listing sexual explicit content

Tingyi Chen New WeChat features

Last week, Alipay released a new feature called Circle (圈子). Within hours of its launch, female students started to post sexually explicit pictures to get comments from wealthy users with high credit score. The feature immediately got huge media attention and triggered discussions on all social medias. Alipay later apologized for its wrongdoing after facing criticism from the Chinese government. Interestingly, …

4 news about WeChat and E-commerce in China

Tingyi Chen New WeChat features

WeChat will soon launch pay-to-read feature Tencent has recently been testing a new feature which allows authors to post a preview of their article, and request readers to pay in order to read the full version.  This new feature enables writers to collect a fee between 0 to 200RMB for a post.  The preview needs to be no less than …

6 things to remember about Tencent quarterly results

Thomas Graziani WeChat news

Tencent just released its results for the third quarter of 2016. Given the company’s dominance in Chinese social space, these are much awaited news. What are the highlights? We break it down for you. WeChat is still booming The one statistics that stands out among these quarterly results is the healthy growth of WeChat. The social network records a 30% …

2016 Single’s Day Data: growth slows down

Tingyi Chen New WeChat features

Single’s Day is over, money’s been spent, your boxes are on their way. Now it’s data analytics time! As a Single’s Day tradition, Alibaba displays the realtime shopping data on a large screen as part of the celebration. No surprise: it’s another record breaking year. 52 seconds, 1 billion RMB 6 minute 58 seconds, 10 billion RMB 2 hours 30 …

Taobao releases VR-shopping for Single’s day

Thomas Graziani New WeChat features

Early this year on April Fools Day, Alibaba released the concept video of the VR product called “Buy+”.  In the video, consumers can have a real shopping experience in a virtual environment.  Here are a few clips from the concept video: The video instantly went viral and got millions of views. Well, it turns out Buy+ was not just an …

Which day and at what time should you post your WeChat articles?

Thomas Graziani New WeChat features

This week, we bring you a WalktheChat “mashup” of two great reports published by Henkuai.com and TrustData about WeChat and e-commerce in China. Highlights are: The optimal posting time and days for WeChat are finally revealed! Read on to learn more. WeChat makes up for 20% of the time users spend daily on mobile APP’s Taobao still dominates the mobile …

WeChat launches two-way-pick banner ads, aiming to triple advertising revenue by 2018

Tingyi Chen New WeChat features, WeChat news

According to eMarketer, Tencent’s digital advertising revenue will reach $11.0 billion by 2018, almost triple from this year. How is Tencent going to do that? Starting in late 2014, Tencent embarked on a slow but steady journey to open up its advertising platform for brands August 2014 –  Introducing banner advertising at the end of articles January 2015 – First WeChat Moment …