Looking at our Shanghai team again, they use QQ for office communication and file transferring at work, but they turn to WeChat to arrange Friday night drinks at a nearby bar. For them, WeChat is more personal, and so they continue to catch up on it throughout the weekend, sharing photos and news. Chinese boy band TFBoys boasts 42 million QQ followers - better than the 38.6 million their American equivalent, One Direction, has on Facebook. Many celebrities use also QQ and Qzone to communicate with fans. They like its ease of use and facility for transmitting large files like images and video. To give you an example, the team in ’s Shanghai office uses QQ during the work day more than WeChat. While QQ’s total active user count fell in the second quarter, it had strong growth among users born since the year 2000. Many users are grade-school and high-school students who have not yet purchased their first phone but do have access to a computer. They are less likely to hail from Tier 1 cities, and 60% are under 30 years old. QQ’s demographics trend towards the young and unsophisticated. So how is QQ going about doing this, and will it be enough to make the platform relevant to marketers again? Why marketers should consider QQ To fight that possibility, QQ is reinventing itself as the online destination of choice for the youngest internet users: teens and pre-teens. In the face of WeChat’s dominance, “Big Brother” QQ risks a Yahoo!-like future of gradually increasing irrelevance. “Little brother” WeChat now has 963 million monthly active users. Imagine it this way: QQ is the less attractive, shorter, and less intelligent older brother who is always upstaged by his younger sibling. QR codes enable consumers to pay for products easily using WeChat WeChat represents that shift to mobile and instant communications, and its QR code mobile payments allow for larger, more varied transactions than can be carried out via QQ. On the older platform, historical sharing comes naturally, while in WeChat’s Moment feature the emphasis is on the here and now. WeChat in many ways is the upgrade to QQ. Like QQ before it, WeChat quickly gained a multitude of new features, capabilities, and users. Instead, the company came up with what we now know as WeChat, a messaging app that works even if users are on different phone carrier networks. Here’s where the story gets tragic for QQ - although not for its parent, Tencent.Īs the mobile computing era got under way, Tencent worried that desktop-native QQ would not make a successful transition. Most revenue actually comes from consumers - in the form of gaming revenue, freemium upgrades and digital purchases. By its tenth year, in 2008, the startup had 856 million total users, a record of 45.3 million simultaneous online users, and more quarterly income than the next two largest Chinese internet companies ( Alibaba and Baidu – you may have heard of them) put together.ĭespite this huge success with users, QQ and Qzone have not done as well with marketers. QQ hit one million users in its first year and 50 million in its second. No longer just a desktop app, QQ and Qzone are also available on your smartphone. You can also stream music, find a partner via QQ’s dating service, and use the Facebook-like Qzone for sharing with friends and reading their posts in your news feed. Today, you can play online games, customize your avatar, send and receive emails and large files, share Snapchat-style disappearing videos and animations, and join online groups of like-minded individuals. 18 years on, QQ’s redesigned logo still sports the familiar penguin, now wearing a red scarf and winking.Īt launch, QQ (then known as OICQ) was just a simple instant messenger and a blatant copy of an Israeli app called ICQ. The original 1999 logo for QQ, then known as OICQ (or Open ICQ). Tencent’s founder, Ma Huateng, known as “Pony Ma”, received startup capital from powerful billionaire Li Ka-shing through a hometown connection between the men. QQ was the first product released by the company Tencent, which is now one of the largest internet companies in the world. In other ways, however, it is only a shadow of its former self. Today, QQ still has some 850 million active monthly users – more than double the number Twitter claims. It has also survived a sustained effort by its own founders to destroy it. Despite being launched all the way back in 1999 (5 years before Facebook), QQ has survived the trials of time. The early daysĪs China’s first hugely popular messaging service, QQ shaped the development of both China’s web and mobile web. It’s also one that every marketer hoping to understand the Chinese social media environment should know. QQ’s story is inspiring and ultimately tragic - as far as tragedy goes in the world of apps.
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