The Top 3 Media Platforms in China: Tencent, ByteDance, and Baidu

To promote and advertise your company, brand, apps and games in China, you’ll need to be familiar with the top 3 media platforms in China today: Tencent, ByteDance, and Baidu.

These three companies’ products cover a wide range, including social media, news apps, search engines, browsers, and video apps. And all three are already making powerful strides into the Western market.

ByteDance

Bytedance was founded in Beijing by Zhang Yiming in 2012. It is a Chinese multinational internet technology company, most well-known worldwide for its international hit mobile app, TikTok, and its gaming business.

TikTok (known as Douyin in China) is a video-sharing social network and is currently the third highest-grossing app in China. Users are generally young, with 90% under 30.

Toutiao is China’s most popular information recommendation engine and boasts over 240 million monthly active users and an average in-app time of 76 minutes.

Tomato Novel is one of China’s most popular reading apps and enables users to both read and listen to whichever books they choose.

Tencent

Tencent is the largest internet company in Asia, publisher of the wildly popular WeChat app used ubiquitously across China. Though the company does not produce any mobile phones, its app store has remained the most popular in China for many years.

WeChat is China’s most popular app, with over 1 billion monthly active users. It’s core functions include messaging, social media, and payments.

QQ Browser is one of China’s leading mobile browsers with 280 million monthly active users.

Tencent Video is the highest grossing entertainment app in China, providing a service similar to Netflix. It has over 900 million monthly active users and 89 million paying subscribers.

Baidu

Even before Google left the Chinese market in 2010, Baidu had been the country’s largest search engine. It remains the dominant player to this day, which is why it is often referred to as “The Google of China”. Baidu’s app store, Baidu Mobile Assistant, is always served up as an option when users search for an app on baidu.com.

Baidu Search is China’s leading search engine. Market share: 76%
Daily active users: 190 million

Baidu Tieba is one of China’s largest online communities. Daily pageviews: 3.5 billion. Monthly active users: 300 million

Haokan Video is among the top short video apps. Average in-app time: 70 minutes. Monthly active users: 200 million

AppInChina’s Media User Acquisition Service

When you are ready to begin mobile advertising across China’s ad networks, top platforms, and social networks, you’ll need professionals at AppInChina who understand the landscape and can develop a custom marketing plan suited to your unique needs, targeted toward your potential customer base in China.

Our User Acquisition service encompasses both Media UA and App Store UA. We recommend a combination of both for most of our clients so they can most quickly determine the most efficient and effective coverage for their target market.

For Media UA, we recommend testing across all three companies’ channels initially, in order to determine the key metrics for each channel. Then we test and expand the campaign, to ensure that results are repeatable to scale, and lock in a system that works to maximize your advertising dollars.