WeChat Official Trivialism

Recently, the Tencent WeChat team issued a rumor on the official Weibo microblog. Three kinds of rumours, including “WeChat x points/articles”, “Fee can be used to pay Q coins in monthly subscriptions,” and “Charging but can forward such information for free” are all rumors. However, there is no clear indication that there will be no charge.

As a typical OTT application, WeChat has a huge impact on mobile operators' SMS and voice services. Operators such as China Unicom and Telecoms believe that the rise of WeChat eroded SMS, MMS and even voice call services, and occupied a large number of signaling resources, putting pressure on operators' networks. On March 31st, Chang Xiaobing, chairman of China Unicom, made it clear that the commercialization of WeChat will be charged. Yesterday some media reported that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officials stated that “WeChat charges are positive, but the details of how fees are still under consideration”.

The rumors of charges caused great concern to consumers, and most consumers tended to avoid charging. According to surveys, 90% of netizens stated that “If WeChat charges will no longer be used”.

Some people think that the WeChat fee refers to the operator's charges to Tencent, not to users, and it is the cost-sharing and redistribution of benefits between companies. Europe has long been a precedent for private operators charging Google and Apple.