Tencent QZone

Chinese Social Media > Qzone

Qzone was created in 2005 by Tencent. It allows users to customize their blogs, keep diaries, send photos and listen to music. Gradually, Qzone has transformed from a personal space to the biggest social network open platform, and its monthly active users grew to more than 600 million.

Qzone was the biggest open platform from Tencent, either judging from its revenue or shared revenue from the third party. Tencent opened Qzone platform, it surpassed competitors like 51.com, Renren and kaixin001.com and generated sizeable revenues for Tencent.

Qzone was created in 2005. It allows users to customize their blogs, keep diaries, send photos and listen to music. Gradually, Qzone has transformed from a personal space to the biggest social network open platform, and its monthly active users grew to more than 600 million.

By the end of 2012, more than 540,000 websites used QQ connection, resembles Facebook connection, to log in Qzone and gain basic QQ user information and add QQ share buttons on their websites.

It has brought in 2 billion yuan (USD 324 million) accumulated income to Qzone third-party developers as of 2013. Apps registered on Qzone surpassed 350 thousand. It has more than 80 thousand registered developers, 90% of which have made money.

Tencent Qzone History

It goes way back to when Peter Zheng, vice president of Tencent, joined Qzone crew in 2006. As soon as he joined, Zheng launched Web 2.0 space  model-blog. This was a successful transformation, and soon its users reached 1 million by the end of 2006.

The number kept growing, and monthly active users broke 100 million at the end of 2007. At the same time, 51.com and Renren attracted a large number of users, Web 2.0 social network became a hit. Facebook was not so well known in China then.

Qzone crew made a second attempt just as most Chinese internet companies were considering social network business model, with strong money and traffic support from Tencent. Like, comment and repost sharing model became mature and catered to the emerging micro-blogging need. In 2009, Qzone users hit 300 million.

In 2011, Qzone users reached 500 million and it transferred to an open platform. Before, the crew tried some small games to test the Qzone open platform.

It was not until the popular game QQ farm, that sped up Qzone's transformation to open platform. When Tencent announced its open platforms, Qzone had formed its own operating model. Since then, Qzone crew was in charge of Tencent open platforms design, QQ connection was also created by them.

QQ was once the biggest traffic entrance and Qzone was the biggest traffic distribution platform.