It had been two weeks and
it is still a hot topic in China. Today, I am going to do a quick status update
on the popularity of China's Mobile Internet Messaging (IM) products.
This is part 8 of long
series of articles on this subject. Part 7 of this article can be found here:
From the following two articles (both are in Chinese):
I will summarize the important point in the above two
articles:
Both of these articles talk about Netease's YiChat:
After the first day, YiChat had 700k new users.
After the first 24 hours, YiChat had more than 1 million
users.
After the first 3 days, YiChat had more than 5 million
users.
The majority of the users are IT workers, white collar
workers, and students.
27% of users coming from China Telecom, 27% of users are
coming from China Unicom, and 46% of users coming from China Mobile.
The short term goal for YiChat is 100 million registered
users and 50 million active users within 6 months.
Those numbers are many times faster than when Tencent's WeChat
first accumulate its new users. Netease's YiChat certainly had much faster
start than the product it is trying to replace (Tencent's WeChat).
From part 5 of this series, Sina's WeMeet was also
launched to compete with both Netease's YiChat and Tencent's WeChat. Let's see
how all three products are doing in the last month. The following chart are the
number of searches on Baidu for all three products.
Note that green curve is the number searches in China for
Tencent's WeChat. The yellow curve is for Netease's YiChat and the blue curve
is for Sina's WeMeet.
The actual number for today, 9/2/2013 (Baidu made a
mistake, it mistakes 9/2/2013 for 10/2/2013), is as follows:
The number of searches for Tencent's WeChat is 72242.
The number of searches for Netease's YiChat is 11088.
The number of searches for Sina's WeMeet is 854.
Note that we are talking about number of searches. One
can't directly convert that to number of new users. For Tencent's WeChat, it
had an install base of 500 million users. I am certain the vast majority of the
searches come from existing users (bug fix, re-intall, etc.). But for both
Netease's YiChat and Sina's WeMeet, since both are brand new product with
install base of zero, vast majority of the searches come from potential new
users.
From the above chart, we can already make two
observations:
First, Netease's YiChat is for real. It is becoming a
real competitor to Tencent's WeChat. Second, unless Sina's WeMeet really picks
up steam in the near future, it is already dead on arrival.
Tencent got almost half its revenue from gaming. Frankly,
it has virtually no expertise in developing games. But all its games (virtually
all of them are from foreign licensed games, many of those licensed games are
junks that nobody wants to play outside of China) are guaranteed to be popular
at least for awhile due to its free QQ (Internet instant messaging) and WeChat
(Mobile instant messaging) services.
By promising free elite QQ (or WeChat) membership or QQ
(or WeChat) emoticons for one month, if the gamer will just play Tencent's
game, Tencent can guaranteed any of its games great popularity (at lease for the
beginning). And for some games that are not half bad, once sufficient player base
formed, it starts to get a life of its own and Tencent would have a hit game.
But this is an unique advantage only Tencent has. But if
Netease's YiChat becomes a significant player, life is going to be miserable
for Tencent.
Netease had demonstrated its ability to develop popular
games. If Netease's YiChat becomes a major player. It would truly be the worst
nightmare for Tencent.
Tencent already show the world how to use its free popular
instant messaging products (QQ and WeChat) to push for gaming and other
Internet Value added services, even though it is pretty bad in developing
games. Could one imaging if a competitor also get a popular instant messaging
product (YiChat), except in this case, the competitor is much better in
developing games?
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