The number of monthly active users WeChat reached 1.098 billion at the end of 2018, up 11% from 988.6 million users in 2017, Tencent said at its earnings report for 2018 on Thursday.
Driving this growth was a higher adoption of the service in lower-tier cities in China, and adoption across a wider range of age groups.
Tencent also revealed that an average of 750 million WeChat users read friends’ posts on the Moments feed per day.
While this represents a huge potential audience for advertisers, Tencent has been slow and deliberate in introducing inventory in the Moments feed.
The company only just introduced a second ad unit in the Moments Feed last year, which was shown to about 50% of Moments’ daily users.
Tencent’s online advertising revenue was up 38%, reaching RMB 17.033 billion, in Q4 2018.
