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WeChat’s short video feature Channels has drawn 200 million users in six months, but can it take on Douyin?
- WeChat’s new short video feature, Channels, is still in beta-mode but has already attracted 200 million users, according to WeChat head Allen Zhang
- The market is currently dominated by Douyin and Kuaishou, both of which have been around for years
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For years, short video in China has been synonymous with two major names: Douyin, the Chinese version of ByteDance’s TikTok, and Tencent-backed Kuaishou.
But in less than six months this year, a new challenger – albeit under a familiar name – has been steadily accumulating millions of users.
“200 million [users] are a start, marking this down because the next time will be at the 300 or 400 million mark,” “father of WeChat” Allen Zhang wrote in a private WeChat post about the app’s new short video feature, Channels, which the app started beta-testing in late January.
Zhang did not specify whether the figure referred to daily active users or monthly active users, and WeChat declined to comment further.
The do-everything app – which also allows users to chat, shop, play games and read blogs and news, among other things – reported in March that it had surpassed 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide, most of them in China.
Channels was introduced at a time when the demand for video content a minute or shorter in length was accelerating. While short video apps were already on an upwards trajectory, the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in people spending more time online amid lockdowns and social distancing measures.
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