WeChat gives short videos more prominence as Tencent goes after ByteDance’s Douyin
- Short videos now appear alongside articles and live streams on WeChat’s subscription page
- Channels, the short video offering of WeChat, still trails TikTok sister app Douyin in terms of daily active users
Tencent Holdings is giving short video content a more prominent position in its super app WeChat, as the Chinese social media and video gaming giant escalates its battle against TikTok owner ByteDance.
In a fresh tweak, WeChat now displays short videos its its subscription section, which previously showed only the latest articles and live streams of public accounts that a user follows. The change, which began as a trial feature earlier this month, makes it much easier for users to access short videos published by these accounts.
WeChat has made several moves to push content in its short video offering “Channels”, which is a latecomer to the content category compared to Douyin, the Chinese sibling of TikTok that has more than 600 million daily active users.
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While WeChat boasts 1.2 billion monthly active users, it has never revealed how many of them actively engage with Channels. Estimates from research firms suggest that Channels had more than 450 million daily active users in October.
This month, WeChat hosted a live-streamed concert by Irish band Westlife, which was massively popular in China around the year 2000. The two-hour online event drew 28 million viewers, with a top comment receiving some 67,000 likes, according to Tencent.
Despite its dominant position as China’s most popular chat app, WeChat faces intense competition in short videos.
In an iiMedia Research report published in January, 45.2 per cent of users surveyed named Douyin as the short video app that they used most often in 2020, followed by 17.9 per cent and 13 per cent who picked Kuaishou and Bilibili, respectively, as their favourite short video app.
Tencent’s renewed push comes amid growing appetite for short videos among Chinese internet users, who are spending more time online amid the Covid-19 pandemic. China had 887 million short video app users as of June this year, up from 647 million users two years ago, according to the latest report published by the state-run China Internet Network Information Centre.
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As with other content categories, however, short videos have been subject to ramped-up online censorship by Chinese authorities.
Earlier this month, the government-affiliated China Netcasting Services Association released a detailed and wide-ranging set of guidelines specifying the types of content that should be banned from short video platforms. They include those that damage China’s image or are incompatible with “socialism with Chinese characteristics”, as well as violent and pornographic videos.
