Impact of QQ

Oct 3rd, 2009 Social Media 0 Comment

Created by founder Pony Ma in Shenzhen, China and developed by his company called Tencent. The QQ program is the leading IM program with a 77% market share and is one of the biggest websites in the world, ranking in the top 3 web properties in China, alongside Baidu and Sina.

QQ Facts

This information came from their website and is fascinating in terms of numbers and potential!

QQ has 342 million active user accounts.
QQ has 42 million peak concurrent users.
QQ has 26.1 million paying internet subscribers & 13.4 million paying mobile subscribers.

The interesting figure is the large number of paying subscribers to the service, MSN and Yahoo must be dreaming of these figures!

Revenue Streams

QQ already does more than $1 billion in revenue (+ 40% net margin). That’s 2x Facebook estimates. Tencent market cap on public market is $21 billion, Facebook’s a theoretical $3-15bn.

Aside from the chat program, QQ has also developed many paid sub-features including games, pets, Q coins, ringtone downloads, etc. Also they sell merchandise based on the toy penguin figure associated with QQ!

QQ Services

I’m QQ is Tencent’s first real English website to introduce QQ to English speakers.
Qzone is a blog, where users can customise their blog.
3G QQ is a free WAP site that can be visited by users at any time.
WebQQ allows you to chat with your friends via a pure Web-based IM client.
QQLive offers both live online video and on-demand video.
QQMail is Tencent’s free email service in the style of Gmail.
Shuqian or QQBookmark is a social bookmaring site similar to Del.icio.us.
Taotao could be described as a micro-blogging site, just like Twitter.
QQVideo is a video sharing site, similar to Youtube.

Join QQ

Signup with your email address, a password and then afterwards download the application.

Signup with QQ
Download for PC Tencent Messenger 2008 or QQ 2009 English (Recommended)
Download for MAC QQ for Mac
Access the ImQQ site for any problems.

Conclusion

If QQ decide in the future to let advertisers publish adverts through the software, then I believe it would be very profitable for the advertiser. They are developing in places in India and Vietnam as potentially in the US with mobile games.

The huge number of additional applications (which look to be “borrowed” from popular Western sites) will make QQ a continual force to be reckoned with and with huge potential for advertisers.