WalkTheChat

WeChat mini-programs are already losing traction

This week, a set of news about WeChat and the digital ecosystem of China:

  1. Mini programs are already losing traction
  2. You can now send and receive gold on WeChat
  3. New data shows Alipay red packets get beaten by WeChat… and also by QQ!

WeChat Mini Programs losing traction

Mini Programs have been launched only a few weeks ago, on January 9th, but the buzz is already fading away. Below is the Baidu search index trend for Mini Programs.

“My Calculator” is a Mini Program that helps users calculate home mortgages, after-tax salaries and currency conversion. It got 50,000 unique visitor on the launch day. During the following week, the numbers continuously dropped, and returning visitors make up only 20-30% of total visitors.

10 o’clock Reading is a podcast-focused WeChat account with 13 million followers. Its WeChat Mini Program only got 34k subscribers, and 4 digit listening per day.

Other Mini Programs like Dedao were delisted from the Mini program.

Without the traffic from a physical location, Mini Program can hardly replace native apps… or even their older siblings, the WeChat Official accounts.

WeChat enables “Gold packets”

The new-rich loves gold, and gift-giving.  A new marketing campaign lets users share red packets that don’t contain money… but grams of gold.

This is a marketing campaign done by Tencent in collaboration with Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). After following a Tencent Gold WeChat account (id: wx-gold), users can give between 0.001-1 gram of gold to friends.

Today, only selected users can access this feature.

It’s a smart way to promote gold as a financial product for the banks, but not a worthwhile investment given the service fee of 5‰.

On the other hand, Alibaba also started a campaign for investing in gold. Users can invest at low as 1 RMB. The payment war is switching from low-value red packet transaction to financial products. That’s where the money is.

New WeChat Red Packet Data

Tencent Penguin Intelligence conducted a survey among 64,540 smart phone users on the topic of red packets.