About WeChat Channels

WeChat Channels

WeChat Channels, known in Chinese as Shipinhao, meaning Video Accounts, is the short-video and live-streaming service built inside WeChat, the messaging, social media and payments application developed by Tencent. It was announced in January 2020 at WeChat's annual conference in Guangzhou, the city where WeChat itself was created, and began testing that same month. Unlike Douyin and Kuaishou, which grew as standalone applications that users had to download separately, Channels was placed inside an application that already had more than a billion users. That single design decision shaped everything that followed: its rapid growth, its distinctive reliance on social sharing rather than purely algorithmic distribution, and Tencent's later decision to make it a centre for advertising, creator income and live commerce.

Origins inside WeChat

WeChat was first released in January 2011 and was created at Tencent's Guangzhou research and project centre under Allen Zhang, often known in English as Zhang Xiaolong. By 2020 WeChat had become China's dominant everyday application, combining messaging, Moments social posting, Official Accounts publishing, Mini Programs and WeChat Pay. What it lacked was a competitive short-video product. Tencent had tried standalone short video before, most notably with Weishi in 2013, but had not held a leading position against ByteDance's Douyin, launched in 2016, and Kuaishou.

Zhang announced Channels in January 2020, saying WeChat would soon allow users to create short-form content. Contemporary reporting by KrASIA noted that he introduced the rollout at WeChat's flagship annual conference in Guangzhou via video, framing Channels as a way for ordinary users to publish video to people beyond their personal contacts. That was a notable break for WeChat, which had historically been a closed, contacts-based network. Channels allowed a post to be discovered by strangers through a feed, while still travelling through chats, groups and Moments when friends shared it.

Testing began a couple of weeks after the announcement. The early product allowed short videos and photos to be posted to a user's own Channel, with hashtags, a location tag, a short description and a link to a WeChat Official Account article. In September 2021 it was reported that Channels had begun allowing hour-long videos, twice the previous limit, signalling a gradual move beyond very short clips toward longer viewing as well.

How Channels works

A Channel is tied to a WeChat identity. Creators publish vertical short videos and live streams that appear in WeChat's Discover area and can be forwarded into private chats and group chats or shared to Moments. Viewers encounter content through a combination of algorithmic recommendation and social recommendation: what friends have liked, followed or shared influences what a user sees, alongside machine-driven ranking. Marketing and platform guides consistently describe this hybrid of algorithm plus social graph as the feature that distinguishes Channels from Douyin's primarily algorithmic feed.

For the viewer, the experience requires no new download and no new account. For the creator, the audience is potentially the whole WeChat user base, reported at about 1.3 billion users in coverage of the period when Channels passed 800 million users. Posts can point outward to Official Account articles and, increasingly over time, inward to shops, Mini Programs and live rooms inside the same closed loop of content, social sharing, commerce and payment.

Growth to 800 million users

Growth was fast even by the standards of China's short-video market. By June 2020, while still described as being in beta, Channels had reached 200 million users, a figure circulated from a Moments post by Allen Zhang and reported by KrASIA. Zhang himself noted that 200 million was only a start. At that time Douyin and Kuaishou were estimated in the same reporting at over 400 million and 300 million daily active users respectively during the Chinese New Year period, when short-video daily use across China reached 574 million according to QuestMobile.

Two years after launch the scale had changed completely. Reporting based on QuestMobile figures, carried by Nikkei Asia and TechNode and summarised by other outlets, put Channels at more than 800 million monthly active users by the end of June 2022, above Douyin's 680 million and Kuaishou's 390 million on the same comparison. S&P Global estimates cited in that coverage put Channels advertising revenue at about 4 billion yuan in 2022. Tencent did not build that audience with a separate marketing funnel; it converted attention that already lived inside WeChat, where users were already sending videos in chats and posting to Moments, a behavioural shift Zhang had identified before launch.

The hope of the whole company

By late 2022 Tencent's leadership was speaking about Channels in unusually strong terms. At an internal staff meeting in December 2022, Tencent chairman and chief executive Ma Huateng, known as Pony Ma, described WeChat Channels as the best-performing business of the WeChat Business Group and the hope of the whole company, according to reporting of the WeChat Open Class Pro in March 2023. TechBuzz China, in its detailed history of the service, likewise recorded Ma naming Channels the hope of the whole company.

That language reflected both opportunity and necessity. Tencent's long-form service Tencent Video faced heavy competition and losses, and its standalone short-video attempts had underperformed. Channels, by contrast, sat inside the company's most defensible asset, its social graph and payments infrastructure. President Martin Lau, known in Chinese as Liu Chiping, told a financial results meeting in March 2023 that Channels revenue had exceeded 1 billion yuan in the fourth quarter of 2022 alone, with, in his assessment, plenty of room for future growth.

Live streaming and live commerce

Live streaming became the commercial engine. Channels hosts live broadcasts across entertainment, knowledge and specialist interests, with coverage noting streams ranging from book appreciation to tea culture, and merchants who turned to live selling after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted physical retail. One widely reported example involved a seller who began a programme on Channels in January 2022 after his shop was affected by COVID-19.

Figures released at the March 2023 WeChat Open Class Pro showed the pace of commercialisation during 2022: total hours spent on the platform increased threefold year on year, live streaming sales revenue increased eightfold year on year, and total income of anchors increased by 447 percent year on year. WeChat encouraged merchants to bring their existing private traffic, meaning customers they already reached in chats and groups, into live sessions, to lengthen broadcasts and to buy paid traffic to expand audiences. It also sought to attract influencers and multi-channel network companies, and tested a local-services component allowing merchants to sell group-purchase coupons through Channels, with local life services identified as a core future direction.

Creators, revenue sharing and advertising

As viewing grew, Tencent added ways for creators to earn money directly so that supply would keep pace with demand. At the 2023 Open Class Pro, Zhang Xiaochao, a Tencent vice president and head of the platform, presented a creator revenue sharing plan and a paid subscription feature for quality creators. Under the subscription idea, creators could set up a paid content area where users became members for a monthly fee, while content with an original declaration received additional support. Tipping, brand partnerships and e-commerce integration provided further income routes, alongside advertising placed through Tencent's wider marketing system, which sells inventory across Moments, Channels, Official Accounts, Mini Programs and WeChat Search from a single advertiser account.

This matters because Channels competes for creators with Douyin and Kuaishou, both of which built large creator economies earlier. Revenue sharing turned Channels from a distribution feature into a livelihood platform for at least part of its creator base, and the reported 447 percent rise in anchor income in 2022 was presented by WeChat as evidence that the economics were beginning to work.

Position in Guangzhou and Guangdong

Channels is catalogued with Guangzhou, Guangdong, because that is where it was announced and where WeChat originated. WeChat began as a project at the Tencent Guangzhou Research and Project Center in October 2010, and Guangzhou is described in contemporary reporting as the app's birthplace. Tencent itself is headquartered in Shenzhen, also in Guangdong, so Channels is a Guangdong product in both its corporate home and its place of announcement. The Guangzhou annual conference, the WeChat Open Class Pro, remained the stage on which Channels milestones, from the January 2020 announcement to the March 2023 commercialisation figures, were presented to creators, merchants and partners.

Competition with Douyin and Kuaishou

Channels entered a market that already had two giants. Douyin, ByteDance's Chinese short-video app known overseas in its separate TikTok form, and Kuaishou, in which Tencent itself held a major investment, including a reported 2 billion US dollar investment in 2019, dominated attention and advertising before 2020. Commentators initially called Channels Tencent's last shot at short video. Its answer was not to outspend rivals on a standalone app, after the Weishi experience, but to change the distribution game: social forwarding inside chats could carry a video through trusted networks in a way a purely algorithmic feed could not replicate, and merchants could close a sale with WeChat Pay without the user leaving the application.

The QuestMobile comparison for June 2022, with Channels ahead on monthly users, suggested that strategy had at least achieved scale parity and beyond. Scale alone did not settle the contest over viewing time, advertising share or creator loyalty, which is why Tencent kept investing in commerce tools, subscriptions and local services rather than treating the user milestone as the end of the story.

Place in Tencent's video strategy

Channels also reshaped Tencent's wider video organisation. In April 2021 Tencent merged Tencent Video, its long-form service, and Weishi, its short-video app, into a combined online video structure, an effort to create synergy between long and short video as viewing habits blurred. Channels itself remained inside WeChat rather than in that unit, preserving its link to the social graph. Together the moves showed Tencent pursuing video on two fronts at once: a content-led long-form platform and a social-led short-video and live platform. Of the two, it was Channels that Ma singled out for praise at the end of 2022, a marker of how completely the January 2020 experiment had moved to the centre of the company's consumer internet strategy.