WeChat is testing a paywall feature for Official Account. Qualified WeChat subscription official accounts can activate this feature and hide the full or partial content.

The paywall feature supports both iOS and Android devices. On iOS, it connects with Apple’s in-app purchase while it uses WeChat Pay on Android smartphones.

What accounts are qualified?

Subscription official accounts that have been registered for more than 3 months with 3 original articles and without serious violation records in the past 3 months. Currently, qualified accounts may be selected to test the feature.

Account owners can charge one of 35 prices between 1 yuan (15 US cents) and 208 yuan (USD30) per article. The earning fully goes to the account owners (except iOS devices when they need to share the profit with Apple).

The paywall is on a per article basis; so, no subscription model is available. The paid article will show an indication in the news stream. Paid article text can not be copied but the images can be saved.

WeChat confirmed its testing of paid subscription in early 2017 but never officially launched; and, it seems a different feature from the paywall for individual articles.

Though the feature comes a bit late since the official accounts have been around for several years, some still rise with WeChat such as Uncle Kai’s Storytime, founded by an ex-CCTV host. Its WeChat official accounts articles generate over 10 million views per month with over 2,000 stories and a total play of 1.5 billion. WeChat is not the only digital platform to make money from information product in China.

“Paid knowledge” market is a rising segment in China in the past few years. More Chinese internet users are used to pay for information and knowledge. The market penetration of paid knowledge reached 21.1% in 2018, up by 77.3% year-on-year.

Baidu Union, Baidu version of AdSense, launched a new tool for publishers to monetize images on their websites.

Image Plus matches the images with relevant content network ads in one of three types of displaying styles:

• Overlay display
• Expanding display from top right
• Icon floating display

Baidu Image Plus ads won’t be activated on more than three images on the same page.

Content marketers and publishers experienced in utilizing third party recommendation engines may be interested to give Baidu Recommendations a try.

Baidu released its content recommendation engine service to its content network publishers around May this year and made it available to the public about one month ago.

According to Baidu, over 1,000 websites have used Baidu Recommendations to boost their traffic and the average increase in traffic is 15%.

It provides three display style (above): pop-up, embedded, slide in.

After selecting the display style, templates will be provided to choose from as shown in the image at the top of this post.

For inbound marketers and content marketers, Baidu Recommendation is worth testing as part of your China content marketing strategy.

Baidu joined with China Consumers’ Association and launched Baidu Netizens Interests Protection Plan. When Baidu log-in users click Baidu PPC and Baidu content network advertisements, they can get full refund of their total lost money from Baidu.

 Limited Coverage

Baidu Netizens Interests Protection Plan is limited to users who satisfy all the requirements below at the same time:

1.  The user should have registered a Baidu account, and must be an individual
2.  The loss occurred when the user have already logged in to his or her Baidu account and clicks a Baidu PPC or Baidu content network ad
3.  The user clicks a link with Baidu PPC or Baidu content network promotion logo, and buy products or services on the website which leads to economic losses

   For example, in Baidu search results, ads with Baidu PPC promotion are marked with logo, which is shown below.
   Baidu content network ads have three features, which are:
   1) with a white or grey Baidu logo
   
   2) If you click on Baidu logo, you will be linked to Baidu content network official website: http://wangmeng.baidu.com/
   3) If you put your mouse on an ad, you will see a url at the bottom of your browser, beginning with http://www.baidu.com/cpro. or http://cpro.baidu.com/cpro

Settlement

1. File your complaint in your Baidu account.
   
   You need to fill in all the required documents to hand in the complaint to Baidu.
2. Baidu Netizens Interests Protection Center would contact with you and the website, give its feedback within five working days. If Baidu Netizens Interests Protection Center couldn’t settle the complaint, the user could apply to People’s Meditation Committee or China Consumers’ Association for meditation. It is no longer limited to five working days.
3. When the meditation comes out from Baidu Netizens Interests Protection Center or People’s Meditation Committee, or China Consumers’ Association, the user could get his or her compensate accordingly.

Exposure

Baidu exposure is a platform for netizens to report phishing and other fraud websites. By September 2 2013, Baidu has settled 3,743 fraud cases which were reported by netizens, and blocked about 16 million fraud websites in total.

The picture above shows the number of exposure by netizens from July to August in 2013.

Baidu awarded million dollar prize to two teams, one of them was speech search engine team. This is the first time when an end-user oriented team won the prize.

Baidu’s million dollar prize is set up by CEO Robin Li, mainly for employees whose position are below director levels. The team should be limited to a maximum of 10 persons. The prize would be awarded to teams which have made innovations and breakthroughs in significant projects, far beyond expectations. The number of winning teams is not limited, which means Baidu would give out the prize to every team achieved the criteria. The prize would give out on Baidu Annual Summer Party.

As the highest prize in Baidu, we could see its mid-term goals through the prizes. In the first two years, the prizes were awarded to realizing full potential of server, content network keyword match and Baidu PPC Phoenix Nest. In this year, one team works on advertising and budget, also focuses on business enterprises. But the speech search team is customer oriented.

Media questioned that Baidu didn’t put much effort on mobile products before. After buying Chinese app distributor 91 wireless for 1.9 billion USD, Baidu awarded mobile terminal developing team with one million dollar which showed growing importance of mobile terminal to Baidu.

Actually, in the past two years, Baidu speech search engine have supported a series of products, such as Baidu voice input, Baidu voice search and Baidu voice assistant.

iFLYTech is Chinese voice recognition software company, with 20 billion CNY market capitalization which is almost the same as Sohu. This gives us a reference for the Baidu speech recognition valuation.