Weishi, The Chinese Short Video-Sharing App Got 160M Video Views In One Day

Chinese Internet firm Tencent is best known for its popular messaging service WeChat, but one of its other products — a Vine-like app that features eight-second videos on loop — has been quietly gathering steam in China.


The app, Weishi, which is only available in Chinese for now, chalked up 160 million video views in a single day on Valentine’s Day this year, which also coincided with the Chinese Lantern Festival.
Tencent says that “millions” of the video clips were also viewed outside the Weishi app itself, via services such as Weixin (the version of WeChat available in China) and mobile IM platform QQ – testifying to the reach that Tencent has in China with the presence of its social platforms.

Recording a video on Weishi is exactly like how you’d do it on Vine or Instagram — tapping and holding on to the screen starts your recording, while releasing it stops the recording.

As per Tencent’s other social services, recruiting celebrities and brands is a huge part of its strategy to appeal to users. More than 1,000 celebrities have set up Weishi accounts to interact with their fans, Tencent says. Weishi was launched in September last year, and according to data tracker App Annie, it has been ranked among the top three most downloaded social networking apps in Apple’s App Store in China from December 27, 2013 to February 25, 2014.

There is much potential for Weishi in China, given that Vine still does not have that much of a presence in the country given its link to Twitter — which is blocked in China.