Who Is Taking Away Your Money From Your Virtual Red Pocket?
Early this month, a mini-program named “You wrap, I answer” went viral on Wechat, the largest social platform in China. Mini-programs are “sub-applications” embedded within the system in Wechat where you can conveniently access the applications without downloading them to your phone, thus, saving storage.Through the mini-program “You wrap, I answer”, Wechat users could prepare a set of questions about themselves and create a virtual red pocket which would contain a certain amount of money. They could then share this mini-program with their contacts. Once their friends answered a certain number of the questions correctly, they could earn random amounts of money from the red pocket.
This mini-program serves networking and relationship-building functions within the social platform. The developer takes advantage of netizens’ curiosity and economically incents them. Not only can the friends answering the questions learn more about their “examiners”, but “examiners” can also test the level of intimacy of the relationship between themselves and their friends. The mini-program became a hit among the young Wechat users; netizens could not resist the temptation to create their own red pockets and “steal” money from their friends’ red pockets.
But who else, beside the netizens playing the game, is taking the money from the red pockets? The developer. In fact, they could earn tons of money by creating a simple mini-program. The mini-program “You wrap, I answer” collects 2% of the money in the red pocket as the service fee. According to the developer of a similar mini-program named “Do you know me”, “Do you know me” gathered 8 million users on the first day of the launch. The number was huge and the success was unexpected.
The mini-programs do not stop at social functions. They are the game changers in the cyber economy, especially in countries such as China that have a huge population of active internet users. By November 2018, Wechat had reached 1 million mini-programs, half the size of Apple’s App Store. It has only been 23 months since Tecent, one of the largest social media companies in China, introduced “mini-programs.” The mini-programs boast 200 million daily active users. The number is significant for e-commerce. In the last quarter of 2017, monthly traffic increased by 323% among fashion-related e-commerce mini-programs, witnessing an unprecedented fast growth. The e-commerce giants in the industry also benefit from the development of mini-programs. In fact, 60% of users did their purchasing via mini-programs from Meituan, Dianping, JD.com,etc.
What is the driving cause of the popularity of mini-programs? Its convenience and storage saving ability are seemingly significant. Moreover, the information pool and the enlarged targeted consumer population is also important. Enabling Wechat users to access any mini-program by scanning QR codes, searching or even locating nearby commerce, allows any commerce with their own mini-programs to have all of Wechat users as the targeted consumer population, becomes which equals over 1 billion netizens. Dining service is a good example of this, where restaurants’ revenue on the platform increased by 32% from November to December in 2017.
Providing sellers with innovative ways of advertising and selling their products, mini-programs succeed in integrating with the real economy including transportation, education and retail, hence facilitating industrial upgrading. There is no doubt that these mini-programs help the industries to reduce operational and marketing costs, thus improving the operational efficiency. The future of mini-programs is unmeasurable.
Edited by Urvi Agrawal.
Sources:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/07/wechat-mini-apps-200-million-users/
China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Industry and Planning Research Institute, Wechat Economic and Social Impact Report 2017, April 2018
