With over 700 million monthly active users according to data
in March 2016, WeChat is the single most popular app in China. In our last
class, we watched a video by New York Times on the influence of WeChat in
China. The video attributed the popularity of WeChat to the variety of
functions WeChat incorporates, such as messaging, posting photos and articles,
paying money, having Skype-like video chats and Ubering. However, even though
these functions help WeChat keep its users from leaving the app, I don’t think
they are the fundamental reason behind its popularity.
In my opinion, one
of the main reasons why WeChat could become so popular was that it was born in
China as one of the first generation of Internet-based alternatives to SMS. At
that time, which was around 2011, SMS was still quite popular in China. But
since it was based on the mobile telecommunications networks, people typically
had to pay a small amount of money for each message they sent. In comparison, some
apps like WeChat enabled communications via the Internet. Although wifi was not
as popular than as it is now and mobile data plans for the phones cost money
too, WeChat messaging cost very little mobile data, and is therefore relatively
cheap.
In addition, there
were also reasons why WeChat could stand out among several similar apps at that
time. First, WeChat was well-designed and comfortable to use. In particular, it
contained one-to-one messaging, group-wise chatting as well as photo posting
that was visible to friends, which achieved a nice combination of dyadic conversations and public
broadcasting according to Daniel Miller. Second, Tencent, the Chinese
tech-giant that created WeChat, was also the company behind QQ, the most
popular online communication platform in China before WeChat. WeChat is a
mobile-app version of QQ in some sense. Because they were both own by Tencent,
the company was able to transfer a lot of QQ users to WeChat directly at the
initial stage of WeChat. Since it is easier for a social media platform to get
popular once it has accumulated an adequate density of users, I think being
able to get the QQ users to get started was a huge advantage of WeChat over the
other competing apps at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment