DIGITAL

Tencent’s Online Ad Revenues Soar As WeChat Claims Nearly 1 Billion Users

by

Jessica Rapp

|

This is the featured image caption
Credit: This is the featured image credit

WeChat’s online ad revenue helped give Tencent’s first quarter results a boost to record-breaking profits.

Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.

PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.

In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris

WeChat’s online ad revenue helped give Tencent’s first quarter results a boost to record-breaking profits.

Tencent beat first quarter estimates with with sales and profit that broke records partly thanks to online ad revenue from its popular social media platform, WeChat. Revenue from this source jumped 47 percent to 6.9 billion RMB (about US$1 billion), with a WeChat monthly active user base of nearly 1 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Earlier this year, WeChat improved its Moments ads feature to give brands the option to incorporate video, photos, text, and links on HTML5-powered pages, all hosted within a sponsored post on users’ Moments feeds. Brands that participated in the trial run for this innovation experienced a major improvement in consumer engagement, with luxury cosmetics giant Lancôme seeing a more than 350 percent increase in the number of searches for the brand, according to a recent report by Fung Global Retail & Technology. Lancôme also saw a 114 percent rise in the browse rate for its web page thanks to the ads.

According to March 2016 data from the China Academy of Information and Communications, about 41.9 percent of WeChat users follow accounts because of business promotions. News acquisition was the only motivating factor for following a WeChat account cited more frequently by those surveyed, meaning the platform’s importance as a marketing tool is only growing. Now, WeChat is working on AI technology that will further streamline these interactions so that brands can better target the right consumers from a massive user base.

WeChat Index is one of the most recent applications of this in that it can show brands, marketers, and users which keywords people are searching for the most on WeChat. The feature, which was launched in March, allows users to look up trending terms on WeChat and compare data for two brands at once.

Still, mobile advertising only makes up 2 percent of WeChat’s revenue, and despite its strong user numbers, WeChat’s growth is slowing, especially in first-tier cities. Much of its expansion potential currently lies in overseas markets and China’s lower-tier cities, as only 43 percent of tier-3 residents were on the platform as of October 2015, according to Fung Global’s report.

Abroad, WeChat’s growth efforts are evidenced by the expansion of its third-party mobile payment platform, whose main domestic contender is Alipay.

In terms of the percentage of users who have used each payment platform as of February, Alipay and WeChat are neck and neck, at 39 and 33 percent respectively. The way that plays out means Alipay has about 400 million registered users, while WeChat is at about 300 million. Alipay also has outrun WeChat in terms of cross-border payments, with 18 currencies supported to WeChat’s nine. WeChat’s transaction volume has been growing, boosted by its e-commerce partnership with JD.com, according to the report.

WeChat’s cross-border payment potential and Tencent’s performance is further evidence for its uncontested role as a marketing tool for Chinese consumers, as the report calls WeChat “by far the most attention-grabbing app in China.”

Article originally posted on Jing Daily

Jessica Rapp
Jessica Rapp

Passionate about style and design, Jessica has been writing about China’s emerging independent fashion scene and the country’s creative industries since moving to Beijing in 2011. She spent two years covering the capital’s dynamic fashion world as style editor of the Beijinger magazine, with her work also featured in publications including Dwell, Design Sponge and artnet News.

DIGITAL

Tencent’s Online Ad Revenues Soar As WeChat Claims Nearly 1 Billion Users

by

Jessica Rapp

|

This is the featured image caption
Credit : This is the featured image credit

WeChat’s online ad revenue helped give Tencent’s first quarter results a boost to record-breaking profits.

Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.

PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.

In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris

WeChat’s online ad revenue helped give Tencent’s first quarter results a boost to record-breaking profits.

Tencent beat first quarter estimates with with sales and profit that broke records partly thanks to online ad revenue from its popular social media platform, WeChat. Revenue from this source jumped 47 percent to 6.9 billion RMB (about US$1 billion), with a WeChat monthly active user base of nearly 1 billion, according to Bloomberg.

Earlier this year, WeChat improved its Moments ads feature to give brands the option to incorporate video, photos, text, and links on HTML5-powered pages, all hosted within a sponsored post on users’ Moments feeds. Brands that participated in the trial run for this innovation experienced a major improvement in consumer engagement, with luxury cosmetics giant Lancôme seeing a more than 350 percent increase in the number of searches for the brand, according to a recent report by Fung Global Retail & Technology. Lancôme also saw a 114 percent rise in the browse rate for its web page thanks to the ads.

According to March 2016 data from the China Academy of Information and Communications, about 41.9 percent of WeChat users follow accounts because of business promotions. News acquisition was the only motivating factor for following a WeChat account cited more frequently by those surveyed, meaning the platform’s importance as a marketing tool is only growing. Now, WeChat is working on AI technology that will further streamline these interactions so that brands can better target the right consumers from a massive user base.

WeChat Index is one of the most recent applications of this in that it can show brands, marketers, and users which keywords people are searching for the most on WeChat. The feature, which was launched in March, allows users to look up trending terms on WeChat and compare data for two brands at once.

Still, mobile advertising only makes up 2 percent of WeChat’s revenue, and despite its strong user numbers, WeChat’s growth is slowing, especially in first-tier cities. Much of its expansion potential currently lies in overseas markets and China’s lower-tier cities, as only 43 percent of tier-3 residents were on the platform as of October 2015, according to Fung Global’s report.

Abroad, WeChat’s growth efforts are evidenced by the expansion of its third-party mobile payment platform, whose main domestic contender is Alipay.

In terms of the percentage of users who have used each payment platform as of February, Alipay and WeChat are neck and neck, at 39 and 33 percent respectively. The way that plays out means Alipay has about 400 million registered users, while WeChat is at about 300 million. Alipay also has outrun WeChat in terms of cross-border payments, with 18 currencies supported to WeChat’s nine. WeChat’s transaction volume has been growing, boosted by its e-commerce partnership with JD.com, according to the report.

WeChat’s cross-border payment potential and Tencent’s performance is further evidence for its uncontested role as a marketing tool for Chinese consumers, as the report calls WeChat “by far the most attention-grabbing app in China.”

Article originally posted on Jing Daily

Jessica Rapp

Passionate about style and design, Jessica has been writing about China’s emerging independent fashion scene and the country’s creative industries since moving to Beijing in 2011. She spent two years covering the capital’s dynamic fashion world as style editor of the Beijinger magazine, with her work also featured in publications including Dwell, Design Sponge and artnet News.

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