
WeChat Impact Report 2016 – latest data about Chinese social media - tjennychen
https://walkthechat.com/wechat-impact-report-2016/
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eric_khun
I've been in China for 5years now. Wechat payment is awesome and made my life
way easier! I pay my rent/taxi/friends/errands/restaurants with wechat. It's
faster to pay with it than cash or credit card. Almost every shop accept it.

It also change my life when dealing money with people. Everyone can transfer
money to each other, and people assume that everyone has it (what is 95% true
in my social circle). I don't need to have cash, credit card, and don't have
to deal with change/money issues anymore with them. You do not need to see
people physically, or ask any bank information.

There is also pretty fun to I see in many group I am in (from 2 to 500
people). You can send "Red envelopes". You set the amount of it, to how many
winner you want, and if the ammount is random across people winning or not).
The others don't know the amount of money in it. The X first(s) to open the
red envelope get the money. I believe this increase the stickiness of the
group you're in. I know some group sending many red envelops a day (for any
kind of reasons). I also believe the number of red envelops sent increased a
lot during the Chinese new year (It's a tradition to give red envelope during
CNY).

For the fee: After 20k RMB , you'll have to pay a 0.1% fee on on every
transfer. The limit is reset every month. You can also put back the money in
your bank. The limit is 1K rmb/week, if that exceeded, you pay some fee (can't
remember how much).

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narrator
Wow. I don't think there's anything close to that in the U.S, maybe PayPal,
but the red envelope thing is really novel. I don't even know how legal that
would be in the U.S. The concept of giving money away randomly is just
strange.

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paradite
Personally I like WeChat's approach: Messaging feature and social feature
integrated in one app, with messaging as the default view when you open the
app.

Facebook is actively separating messaging feature from the main app and force
users to use two different apps, which is inconvenient IMO.

Maybe it is just a legacy issue where Facebook started as a social media
whereas WeChat started as a messaging app, but I am interested to see if
Facebook would be better by prioritizing "messaging" over "feed".

(Disclaimer: I am a Chinese user.)

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girzel
I'm actually really surprised at the 67% male statistic. I guess all I have to
go on is personal observation, but I have a very hard time believing the
gender imbalance is that big.

On the other hand, I live in Beijing, and just looking around you'd be hard-
pressed to believe that China as a whole has a gender imbalance – if anything,
there seem to be more women than men. Perhaps the majority of men have
remained in the countryside? Where they're spending their time on WeChat? I'd
be very curious to see if anyone's done a population study of gender by
region...

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AStrangeMorrow
I'm surprised too. I'm also curious about whether the male/female stat is
asked directly to the user or is just the gender indicated on the person
profile. If it is the second option (I doubt it tho...), I know quite a number
of girls that set their profile as "male" for various reasons... It is also
indicated that default gender is "male" so maybe a lot of persons didn't
wanted to disclose this information and were set up as male (doesn't seems
likely either).

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nadu
It says 67% of users used WeChat to make payments of atleast 100RMB a month.
That's a significant number! I guess WeChat makes a commission on that
payment. Would that be the largest moneymaking feature of WeChat?

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kercker
WeChat users can send Red Envelope to friends or relatives. It is often used
as a game in a WeChat group. I dont think this can be counted as real payment.

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dilemma
I order lunch on WeChat and send a red envelope inside a group chat as payment
after its been delivered. The group has 300+ members. This is the exception,
though. There are better ways of making payments through WeChat and I'm
guessing that envelopes make up a small fraction of the stated number.

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thomas_duqi
I think the most mindblowing fact in this report is the fact that 70% of
WeChat users have 100+ RMB transaction per month.

This level of mobile payment adoption could only be dreamed of in Europe...

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k_vi
Is there any way I can ascertain the validity of the report? Although it says
"Translated from Tenscent penguin intelligence and China Academy of
Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), 2016 WeChat impact report",
I wanted to make sure.

Is there possibly a link to original source?

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anqurvanillapy
The Chinese title of this report is 微信影响力报告 (Report of the Influence of
WeChat) or simply 微信报告 (Report of WeChat). And the issue number is 43
(2016.3). Those are the keywords can be googled.

And this is the link of the report from QQ (Tencent) official website:

[http://tech.qq.com/a/20160321/007049.htm](http://tech.qq.com/a/20160321/007049.htm)

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tjennychen
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[https://walkthechat.com/career/](https://walkthechat.com/career/)

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markten
do you perhaps have a PDF version? thanks

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paradite
I don't think there is a PDF version available from the website. If you don't
mind the extra things on the page, in Chrome you can save the entire page as
PDF using the built-in print function.

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tjennychen
Everything you need to know about WeChat

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dawei
I've lived in China off and on for the last 13 years, and my wife is Chinese.
She, her family, and her friends all use it, and they constantly try to get me
to use it.

I refuse to use any Chinese social media. They wouldn't allow something they
couldn't control or monitor, and I don't feel like giving them a direct eye on
all my private chats, pictures, finances, etc. At least Facebook gives me the
illusion of privacy.

