WeChat Has Had 396M Monthly Active Users and 5.8M Public Accounts

WeChat monthly active users reached 396 million in more than 200 countries and regions as of this month (July 2014), WeChat disclosed yesterday at an event.

Public accounts, service accounts and subscription accounts, have reached 5.8 million since the public account system was launched in August 2012, with 15,000 added daily. Sogou, the search service developer Tencent has a stake in, had indexed more than 4 million public accounts and their contents as of June 2014 since WeChat allowed it to, according to its latest earnings report released earlier this week.

It is estimated there are more than 10, 000 developers and 10, 000 app development companies are developing applications for WeChat public accounts — A handful of APIs, for functions such as speech recognition, are available for developers to build sophisticated features for public accounts. Since the first API was released in May 2012, 67,000 applications, including those for mobile payments, have been developed on top of WeChat public accounts.

The self-service advertising system launched earlier has had 10, 000 advertisers and 1000 content publishers.

90% of the qualified accounts run by businesses have introduced the mobile store system. It’s been only two months since it was launched. More APIs for speech recognition, image recognition, location positioning, etc. will be available for businesses to develop related features for their accounts, according to WeChat.