QQ’s anxieties are all written into WeChat mini-programs

Recently, QQ has been on the hot search again, this time because of WeChat.

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Why did QQ launch WeChat Mini Program?

Recently, some netizens discovered that Tencent QQ has launched a small program called "Tencent QQ" on the WeChat platform. From the specific usage, after authorization, users can log in to their QQ numbers through this small program to receive QQ messages, and can also switch accounts and set notifications - the overall functions are very limited, and the user's mobile QQ must turn on login protection to use this small program.

But if you need to reply to the message, you need to jump to open the mobile QQ App.

The update record information of this mini program shows that the developer behind it is Shenzhen Tencent Computer Systems Co., Ltd., which is Tencent officially; previously, this mini program was named "QQ Space Time Machine" and was originally registered on March 19, 2019.

Obviously, this mini program named "Tencent QQ" is essentially a tentacles of Tencent QQ to the WeChat platform, and its purpose is largely to guide users to open the QQ application in their mobile phones and improve the user activity of QQ itself. From the user feedback, some users said that this is good because they can not miss QQ messages; some users said that with this mini program, they can uninstall QQ; of course, there are more users who do not buy it and think it is useless.

In Leifeng.com's view, this move clearly reflects QQ's anxiety about user activity.

According to Tencent's third quarter 2019 financial report released this month, as of September 30, 2019, the number of monthly active QQ accounts was 731 million, down 8.9% year-on-year and 9.5% month-on-month. At the same time, the number of monthly active accounts on QQ smart terminals was 653.4 million, down 6.4% year-on-year and 7.5% month-on-month. The number of monthly active accounts on smart terminals of QQ Space was 517 million, down 2.7% year-on-year and 6.1% year-on-year.

It can be seen that the number of monthly active users of QQ has dropped significantly when calculated from multiple dimensions. Although Tencent attributed the reason to "we upgraded our security strategy and proactively cleaned up accounts that spammed messages and had malicious robot activities" in its financial report, it is not difficult to draw a conclusion from this - more and more users are abandoning QQ.

At the same time, QQ's "brother" WeChat is still gaining more and more favor from users - financial report data shows that the number of monthly active users of WeChat and WeChat after the merger increased by 6.3% year-on-year and 1.6% month-on-month. The number of active users reached 1.15 billion, far exceeding QQ's 730 million.

A story of coming from behind

Compared with QQ, which is nearly 21 years old, WeChat seems too young. It was launched on January 21, 2011, nearly 12 years later than QQ, and is less than 9 years old. But obviously, whether in terms of the number of active users, the coverage of user groups, or even the ecosystem itself, WeChat has surpassed QQ in all aspects.

This is a story of catching up.

QQ certainly had an extremely glorious past, and it even laid the foundation for the glory of the entire Tencent Empire today. We have no intention of summarizing the growth process of QQ, but there is a time node that can explain everything: at 19:52:58 on March 5, 2010, the number of concurrent online users of Tencent QQ exceeded 100 million - this is the first time in the world since mankind entered the Internet era that the number of concurrent online users of a single application exceeded 100 million.

From today's perspective, it seems that breaking through 100 million is nothing; but at that time, for this breakthrough, Tencent sent a letter of thanks to the majority of netizens in the name of the company, and Tencent's technology channel opened a special topic; at the same time, major media including CCTV and Southern Weekend reported enthusiastically. CCID Consulting Expert Liu Yubin said that from 100 million to 100 million, "Tencent QQ has walked a perfect track"; and Jiang Qiping, Secretary General of the Information Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said:

The number of simultaneous online users exceeding 100 million is a sign that the era when Google and others set the rules of the game on the domestic Internet is gone forever. The rules of the game on China's Internet will be set by the Chinese themselves.

This was a highlight in QQ's history. WeChat had not yet been born at that time. It is worth mentioning that the number of registered users of QQ had exceeded one billion at that time.

But time always has the power to change the world. Under the surging tide of mobile Internet, even Ma Huateng and Zhang Xiaolong himself would not have thought that in less than seven years, WeChat would have completed a perfect counterattack against QQ from birth to growth to expansion and deification.

On March 22, 2017, Tencent released its 2016 full-year and Q4 performance reports. The report showed that as of December 31, 2016, QQ's monthly active accounts reached 868 million, up 2% from the same period last year; in comparison, the combined monthly active accounts of WeChat and WeChat reached 889 million, up 28% from the same period last year.

At that time, Tencent did not announce the specific time when WeChat's monthly active accounts surpassed QQ, but judging from the number of monthly active accounts, before the end of 2016, WeChat had surpassed QQ and became the largest service application of Tencent and even the Chinese Internet.

That was the first time that WeChat surpassed QQ in terms of volume since its launch, and the first surpassing became a continuous surpassing until today. The peak of QQ's monthly active users was 899 million in the Q2 2016 financial report, which was the highest peak of monthly active users since QQ was born, and the highest peak of monthly active users in QQ's nearly 21 years of development, and it still remains the case today.

WeChat continued to gain more users and exceeded 1 billion monthly active users during the 2018 Spring Festival.

QQ has chosen to embrace the post-00s

For Tencent, QQ and WeChat are both its own children; however, each has to find its own way. After WeChat has become the de facto national app, QQ has gradually become the territory of young people born in the 1990s and even the 2000s.

In fact, as early as the second quarter of 2016, Tencent had already given data in its financial report: at that time, nearly 60% of QQ users were born after 1990, and nearly 80% of QQ members were also born after 1990 - and among the 308 million users who participated in the QQ red envelope "swipe" activity on New Year's Eve 2016, those born after 1990 accounted for 75%.

Therefore, based on the fact that the overall QQ user group tends to be younger, QQ proposed the concept of "entertainment and social ecology" at the 2016 Global Partner Conference, taking entertainment as an important direction for QQ's development. As a result, many entertainment products such as "NOW Live", QQ Views, and "Daily Trace" appeared on the mobile phone side of QQ; at the same time, QQ also connected to Tencent Animation and cooperated with many external parties in film, television, literature, games and other aspects.

In addition to entertainment, QQ has also made attempts to cater to office scenarios.

In mid-November 2016, Tencent QQ released an application called TIM. According to the website introduction, this application is "QQ for light chatting" and can be "more convenient for office work", so the PC version was launched at the beginning - this was interpreted as QQ trying to use some of its unique product advantages (such as file transfer) to occupy the specific scenario of corporate office.

In the following two years, as the post-00s gradually grew up, they became the main definition group of "young people" in QQ's eyes.

In May 2019, QQ released a 2019 social behavior data report specifically for the post-00s, which showed that in the third quarter of 2018, the year-on-year growth rate of monthly active users aged 21 and below (broadly speaking, people born in 1998 and 1999 are also included in the post-00s) was 16%, and the year-on-year growth rate in the fourth quarter of 2018 was 13%.

There is another set of data in this report that is worth noting:

• Among today's QQ members, half are born after 2000, of which 71% are boys and 29% are girls.

It can be seen that the post-2000s are really willing to spend money on QQ.

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