78.8% of netizens would never accept it! Why is WeChat charging so annoying?

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A few days ago, WeChat was revealed to be launching a "paid cloud storage service for chat records". On Weibo, the topic has attracted more than 1 billion views, and there are many different opinions on this, but Tencent has not responded.

It is interesting to note that this paid service may implement different charging strategies. The price for Apple is 180 yuan/year, while that for Android is 130 yuan/year. "Why should I pay 50 yuan more out of thin air?" One user expressed his dissatisfaction.

Some users also sarcastically said: "WeChat has found another way to make money without doing anything. Will it launch a policy in the future where ordinary members can only send 100 messages a day, while gold members can send 1,000 messages a day?"

Previously, WeChat founder Zhang Xiaolong once revealed his true feelings at the WeChat Open Class. After the new version of WeChat was released, 100 million people taught him how to make products every day. However, in recent days, the number of people teaching Zhang Xiaolong how to make products has obviously exceeded this limit.

In the questionnaire surveys initiated by 21st Century Business Herald, Sina Technology, and Boss News, more than 633,000 people voted, of which 499,000 voters said they did not accept the paid model of cloud backup of WeChat chat records, accounting for more than 78.8%.

Faced with overwhelming opposition, is WeChat's move really appropriate? And is the service fee of more than 100 yuan too high?

Three reasons for not accepting payment

According to Tencent's latest financial report, as of June 30, 2021, the combined monthly active users of WeChat and WeChat were 1.251 billion. As a national-level APP, WeChat has long been integrated into people's work, life, study and other aspects.

Correspondingly, the data on WeChat, such as work documents, chat records, and Moments, are also accumulating more and more. Opening the mobile resource manager, WeChat is the application with the highest memory usage on almost every user's mobile phone.

However, Tencent has not provided an effective management method for the storage management and migration of WeChat data. Previously, users could only rely on local storage, screenshots, or other cloud service products for backup. For data migration between different devices, they mainly relied on PCs as a medium. Once the phone was lost or the device was damaged, the data that was not backed up in time would face the dilemma of no hope of recovery.

To a certain extent, the launch of WeChat chat history cloud backup function may be a breakthrough. Some users expressed their expectation in the comment area, "Why did it come so late?" For them, the value of WeChat data is far greater than the annual storage fee. If it is lost, it will not be worth it. They think that the value of opening cloud backup exists.

However, for more users, whether chat records still need to be paid for storage has become a question worth discussing.

In the above-mentioned survey, nearly 80% of users said they “do not accept the payment model”. Their reasons can be attributed to the following three points:

1. Is it really necessary to pay to keep chat records?

Some users said that daily chat records are too fragmented, and paying to keep them is not only hypocritical but also worthless. "Chatting is just chatting, there is no need to save them to dig up the past or reminisce. Records are the past, don't force yourself to keep them."

2. You can collect items for free through the WeChat collection function. In addition, you can also back up your collections with the help of third-party clouds such as iCloud and Baidu Cloud. Why do you need to enable backup specifically?

This group of users believes that WeChat is becoming more and more like QQ, and basic functions require payment. Currently, DingTalk can refresh one year's chat records for free, while Feishu and other platforms can permanently save chat records. Tencent's rush to pay is a bit "shameless" and "greedy."

3. Why not improve other inconvenient functions as soon as possible?

Users said that many of WeChat’s functions have been complained about for years, but there has been no improvement. WeChat has “monopolized” daily communication and is still fearless, so it needs to be regulated.

Objectively speaking, whether WeChat launches the cloud storage subscription function depends entirely on its own product operation ideas. However, for a super app that carries almost all the people in the country, a slight change may affect the lives and living habits of hundreds of millions of people.

Someone did the math and found that Apple's iCloud pricing in mainland China is 6 yuan per month for 50GB of storage, 21 yuan per month for 200GB of storage, and 68 yuan per month for 2TB of storage, which corresponds to annual charges of 72 yuan, 252 yuan, and 816 yuan, respectively. Based on the 180 yuan per year for WeChat chat history cloud backup, this means that Tencent's monthly fee is 15 yuan, and the corresponding storage space is at least 100GB.

For most ordinary users, is it really necessary to spend money to upgrade themselves to a super App with a cloud storage capacity of more than 100GB?

WeChat also has anxiety

According to people familiar with the matter, at present, whether WeChat will launch a paid chat history backup function is still in the final push, and the specific details have not been finalized. Tencent has not responded to this yet. But it is obvious that this has become a message that Tencent has taken the initiative to release to test the outside world's reaction.

Tencent registered the "WeChat Cloud" trademark in July this year. Its business scope covers website services, communication services, advertising sales, etc. Currently, this trademark is in the "awaiting substantive review" status. Judging from the change in this industrial and commercial information alone, WeChat cloud storage may really be coming.

In the view of communications industry analyst Lu Xin, this may be due to Tencent's need to build an ecological closed loop due to the loss of its traffic business to TikTok.

According to Tencent's latest financial report, as of June 30, 2021, the combined monthly active users of WeChat and WeChat were 1.251 billion, a year-on-year increase of 3.8% and a month-on-month increase of 0.8%; the monthly active users of QQ on mobile terminals were 590 million, a year-on-year decrease of 8.8% and a month-on-month decrease of 2.6%. In terms of the number of active users and engagement of WeChat, the data are both increasing, but the growth rate has slowed significantly.

According to statistics from Jiguang Big Data, since Q2 2020, the average time spent on short videos on apps has exceeded that of instant messaging, and the gap between the two is getting bigger and bigger. In terms of advertising, according to QuestMobile data, in the first half of 2021, the budget spent on Douyin channels accounted for 76.1%, far exceeding WeChat's 13.3%.

WeChat has begun to fall behind in competing for users' time and advertisers' fees, and this may be a key signal that forces it to make changes.

"If the WeChat cloud backup service is launched, it may be able to snatch some business from the product ecosystem of Baidu Netdisk and other products, and it will also be very helpful in enhancing user stickiness." An executive of a cloud computing company said this in communication with Sina Technology.

In addition, the launch of WeChat cloud storage paid service will also directly benefit Tencent's cloud computing business, which has been supported in recent years. According to industry insiders, based on the current base of 1.251 billion active WeChat users, even if only 10% of users pay, Tencent can obtain at least 16 billion yuan per year in revenue growth.

Based on Tencent Cloud's current second-largest comprehensive capabilities in the country, the technologies and businesses between the two can be quickly connected.

In addition, data security is also one of everyone's concerns. Luan Lin, head of security technology at a big data company, told Sina Technology, "Since it is a paid service, the company must ensure that user data is not lost or leaked.

From Tencent's perspective, the WeChat server's ability to resist risks should be guaranteed, but for users, whether they are willing to let WeChat save their private chat information remains to be discussed."