WeChat Advertising Platform !

This week, Tencent, WeChat's operator, said it launched a new service in mainland China whereby companies that have verified WeChat accounts can pay fees to place ads on other companies’ official pages with more than 100,000 followers. 


The fees will be shared by Tencent and the companies that host the ads on their pages.

Although WeChat’s core function is instant messaging, it has Facebook like profile pages, photo-sharing and many other features.

Like individual users, companies can also set up their accounts for free and accumulate followers – somewhat like Twitter. The new advertising service, still a beta version, is Tencent’s latest attempt to make money through WeChat, which has about 400 million monthly active users, mainly in China.

For popular messaging apps like WeChat, Silicon Valley’s WhatsApp and Japan’s Line, one big question is whether they could one day become major advertising platforms like Facebook and Google.

Line, owned by South Korean Internet firm Naver, collects monthly fees from companies that have official accounts; those companies can send promotional messages to their followers. South Korea’s Kakao, another popular chat app, also offers a similar service.

WeChat’s new service is a little different. The ads are not distributed as instant messages; they appear at the bottom of corporate pages. Advertisers can specify their target viewers based on gender, age, location and even areas of personal interests, according to Tencent.

Based on those conditions, Tencent’s back-end system that matches advertisers and viewers will decide which corporate pages will host the ads.

It’s still too early to tell whether the new service can be successful. For this to become a major source of revenue, more consumers would have to follow corporate accounts and view their pages on WeChat.

For now, marketing opportunities through messaging apps are limited, said Forrester Research analyst Thomas Husson in a report released this week.

“Most people do not want brands to interfere on such intimate turf,” he wrote. “They prioritize interactions with family and friends and do not see the benefit of connecting with brands.”

WeChat and other Asian messaging apps are still trying to figure out how to integrate ads into tools that are supposed to offer intimate, uninterrupted communication.

Still, ads are just one of several ways through which the app makers are trying to make money. WeChat, Line and Kakao have all integrated mobile games into their services already.

Those games are basically free, but players pay for virtual items and other additional features. Line and Kakao also sell virtual stickers that chat users can send to one another. Some apps are also trying to integrate online shopping features.

In the long run, some of those apps could become portals that integrate games, location-based services and shopping into a single platform, Forrester’s Husson wrote.

 “If you think messaging apps are just a free way to communicate, you’re missing their potential.”