Tencent held the third conference for third-party developers on its open platform today. Two years ago the company announced to open up so that third parties could take advantage of the huge traffic within its empire. Now the Open Platform is hosting 400 thousand apps. Ten million developers signed up to it in the past two years.
In the past two years a total of 3 billion yuan (about $480 million) was shared to third parties. It is expected that the number for this year alone would be that big.
The company promised not to take any revenues from a developer whose monthly revenue was under 100 thousand yuan (about $16 thousand). Cloud storage plans and ad placements are also offered to starters for free in the hope that they’d get traction on the platform sooner. Investments and services that worth a total of 2 billion yuan (about $330 million) will be provided this year, according to Dawson Tang, senior VP of Tencent.