How Do WeChat Official Accounts Make Money? A Detailed Breakdown of Common Monetization Methods
A WeChat Official Account is an application account that developers or businesses register on the WeChat Official Account platform. This account is interconnected with QQ accounts. Through Official Accounts, businesses can achieve comprehensive text, image, voice, and video communication and interaction with specific groups on the WeChat platform, forming a mainstream online-and-offline WeChat interactive marketing method. Now let's take a look at how WeChat Official Accounts make money!
Traffic Monetization
Traffic monetization is a method passed down from the Weibo era and even the personal website era, and it is also the easiest method for grassroots self-media to think of. This type of Official Account actually has an official name on WeChat, namely the “Traffic Master.” As the name suggests, it exchanges traffic for advertising fees, earning advertising revenue shares through display and even performance-based payment methods.
Surely no one would deny that joke writers are always the most popular presence on social media. Some may question their brand value, but undoubtedly, the data proves that among WeChat Official Accounts, those named with “cold jokes” as a keyword occupy the majority of the top ten accounts by read count. Since the target audience of such accounts is usually grassroots people, who are not favored by mid-to-high-end advertisers, the most feasible and sustainable monetization model for them can only be the Guangdiantong platform opened by WeChat officially, a traffic aggregation trading market similar to Baidu's advertising alliance.
Through the Guangdiantong at the bottom of the page, a “cold jokes” type WeChat Official Account with a million-level real followers can earn up to more than 100,000 yuan per month in advertising revenue shares. However, since Tencent itself is not particularly strong in the online advertising business, and WeChat officially intends to suppress this type of non-premium content, Guangdiantong income dropped significantly after the 2015 Spring Festival, truly becoming “cheap traffic.”
Crowdfunding and Tips
Currently, the “Original,” “Appreciation,” and “Comment” features of WeChat Official Accounts have become the aspiration of most self-media operators. To support quality content and ensure a healthy ecosystem, WeChat officially began gradually testing the issuance of the “Original” label to media organizations and individual entities with continuous original content creation capabilities starting from early 2015. The vast majority of WeChat Official Accounts that received this label can simultaneously activate the appreciation feature, accepting “tips” that people can directly make through WeChat Pay, rather than only being able to place a transfer QR code at the end of an article. This feature greatly stimulated the enthusiasm of original authors. According to estimates, for a highly popular Official Account like “Chaobian Wangshi,” getting over 10,000 yuan in appreciation for a single piece of content is by no means difficult.
The fan economy scenario of appreciation can also be converted into a crowdfunding model, which is a model of mobilizing advance payment for a predetermined goal. Whether this predetermined goal is an article or a product like a speaker, the crowdfunding model has also followed the trend of the mobile internet and become a monetization method in the new media field, particularly suitable for self-media that already have a certain brand or celebrity effect.
Offline Activities
For some WeChat Official Accounts that do not excel in original content or do not have sufficiently large traffic, there is also the offline activity model, which is particularly suitable for segmented regions and vertical industries. Whether it is group buying, parent-child trips, or training and social networking, offline paid scenarios are always more acceptable to Chinese people than online ones where free models prevail. Of course, moving from online to offline also greatly tests event organization capabilities. In this regard, media organizations can often handle it with ease, while self-media still at the individual stage needs to seek external support.
For example, Wuxi Network is rooted in the poorest remote areas of the mountainous region of Chongqing, where the county town has a resident population of less than 100,000. Yet the WeChat Official Account opened by this local website has gained more than 70,000 subscribers. Combined with its website forum, this WeChat Official Account features serving local livelihoods and provides many offline services. Another example is Youth Business School, which gathers a large number of middle-class people and earns income through youth overseas study tours. “Huanfang Qiuye PPT” sells PPT training tutorials and has also earned more than a million in revenue online.
E-commerce Model
The e-commerce model poses a greater challenge to operators, but also offers greater room for imagination. Not satisfied with merely directing traffic for e-commerce platform advertisements, some WeChat Official Accounts positioned around lifestyle services have begun to directly engage in e-commerce sales, not seeking to become a mall like Tmall or JD.com, but only seeking to build a brand in a certain high-profit-margin category.
For example, “Car Play Professor” received 15 million yuan in angel investment shortly after its establishment. What investors valued was not only the advertising order for Qoros Auto worth up to one million yuan in a single day, but also the online car sales plan that its team is actively engaging in. Another example is “Yitiao.” Although this Official Account, which can be called a “phenomenon-level” account, was able to stand on the WeChat open class stage due to its high-quality short videos, according to what its founder told me, what VCs valued was absolutely not its production capability, nor its video advertising quotes reaching over a million yuan, but rather the spending power of its more than 5 million followers. This group of middle-class people with high demands for quality of life is the main consumer group for food, travel, and luxury goods, and “Yitiao” has the opportunity to directly provide services to them.