ByteDance apps Toutiao, Douyin engage Chinese consumers longer than Tencent’s WeChat, survey says

Users of news aggregator Toutiao spent an average of 73.4 minutes on the app every day, while those on Douyin spent a daily average of 72.9 minutes
Super app WeChat, known as Weixin on the mainland, engaged its users by a daily average of 60.6 minutes

Apps

Xinmei Shen

Published: 6:45am, 22 Oct 2020

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TikTok owner ByteDance is engaging China’s consumers longer through its popular apps Douyin and Jinri Toutiao, compared with rival Tencent Holdings’ multipurpose social media platform WeChat, according to a new survey from analytics firm TalkingData.

The survey, which was first reported by Chinese tech site 36Kr, said users of news aggregator Toutiao spent an average of 73.4 minutes on the app every day. Toutiao reportedly had more than 1.5 billion monthly active users as of July last year.

Users of Douyin, the Chinese-language version of hit short video-sharing app TikTok, spent a daily average of 72.9 minutes. As of August, Douyin had more than 600 million daily active users.

Super app WeChat, marketed as Weixin on the mainland, engaged its users by a daily average of 60.6 minutes, according to TalkingData. It did not say the exact period when this survey was conducted this year. Combined monthly active users of WeChat and Weixin reached 1.2 billion at the end of June.

Users of Tencent-backed short video app Kuaishou and social e-commerce platform Xiaohongshu, in which both Tencent and Alibaba Group Holding are investors, have spent an average of nearly one hour daily on each of those apps, according to the survey. Alibaba is the parent company of the South China Morning Post.

Other everyday apps for Chinese consumers, including Weibo and Zhihu , recorded a daily average of less than an hour in the survey.

A man walks by the logo of TikTok owner ByteDance at the company’s headquarters in Beijing on July 7. Photo: Reuters

The numbers reflect how online consumer engagement in China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has increased through the years, as the country’s number of internet users expanded and its smartphone market became the largest worldwide.

China has more than 904 million internet users, according to the latest data from the state-run China Internet Network Information Centre. About 897 million, or 99.3 per cent, of those internet users go online with their mobile devices.

Advances in big data analysis and online artificial intelligence algorithms, combined with trends such as live-streaming video and social commerce, have helped the operators of popular Chinese apps boost user stickiness amid economic, public health and geopolitical crises.

More than 90 per cent of all consumers of online content spend more than an hour on various apps every day, and 26.4 per cent of them spend more than three hours on these platforms every day, according to the TalkingData survey. Engagement has also increased because many internet users in China have become both creators and consumers of online content, according to the 36Kr report.

A man walks past an advertisement of ByteDance's news feed app Jinri Toutiao in Beijing in October of 2017. Photo: Reuters

Toutiao, for example, had more than 1.8 million creator accounts that churned out more than 600,000 pieces of content every day in 2019, according to the company’s website. These accounts include professional news outlets as well as small teams or individual content creators. Their content appears on users’ feed based on their interests.

That personalised content distribution system, which was pioneered by Toutiao, is now also used by other online platforms such as Zhihu and Xiaohongshu.

About 73.6 per cent of the people surveyed by TalkingData said they are happy to receive personalised content recommendation. Still, there are some who have complained that recommendations included poor quality content, too many advertisements, misinformation and repetitive information, according to TalkingData.

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