Blog: WeChat

The NBA is the third highest grossing league globally, generating $7.4 billion in 2017, behind domestic rivals MLB and NFL. Whereas the MLB and NFL have largely struggled to entice a truly global following, the NBA have become synonymous with Chinese sports fans, and offers a template for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) to grow its international fanbase.

For Facebook, Instagram serves three critically valuable purposes: it maintains Facebook’s connection with younger users – shielding itself from competition with Snapchat. Secondly, it is opening up crucial new revenue streams via Instagram story ads.

Chinese tech giant Tencent, the company that 12 months ago you probably were not paying attention to, is now the second largest messaging app ecosystem globally, behind Facebook. Tencent is the only company currently monetising its digital consumer base effectively.

With Tencent making headlines for its recent round of high-profile media investments in Spotify and Skydance Media, alongside recent concerns stemming from the Q4 2017 earnings released in March, investors are waiting with baited breath for the Q1 2018 earnings due on May 16.

The digital foundations of premium video are undergoing profound transformation. Firstly, traditional TV programming and feature films are becoming decoupled from their original distribution technologies and repositioned as premium video content for digital services.

As tech’s big players continued to rollout their Q3 earnings reports, one of the most startling revelations was quietly embedded within Snap Inc’s stock ownership. The section read: In November 2017, Tencent Holdings Limited notified us that it, together with its affiliates, acquired 145,778,246 shares of our non-voting Class A common stock via open market purchases.

Snapchat has gone public, yet investors are still cagey on the company's IPO in response to Facebook’s regular copying of the ephemeral image-based app. Such is the extent of this that in response to the S1 filing, there was a popular meme on LinkedIn suggesting Snapchat going public was even more impressive when ‘CEO Evan Spiegel has simultaneously now been the Chief Product Officer at Facebook for over a year’.

It’s no secret that Asian messaging platforms have been leading much of the global innovation efforts, regarding the monetization of mobile messaging. Last week it emerged that WeChat is trialling Paid Content for public accounts.