Data reveals 84% of WeChat account managers make less than 10k RMB / month

The WeChat analytics website Newrank just released a new survey of 1,032 social media account operators (“Self-media” or “自媒体”) in China.

Who are they? How much do they make? How do they generate revenue? All of the answers are below!

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Who are they?

The survey reveals that social media account operators in China are:

• Majority male (74.1%)
• Pretty new to the job: 45% of them have been operating an account for less than a year, and only 16% for more than 3 years

We also learn that the participants of the survey are:

• Mostly young people: only 11% of them are older than 37 years old, while 42% are under 22)
• Located in large cities: 66% of the account operators are located in Tier 1 or Tier 2 cities
• Highly educated: 88% of them have a bachelor degree or above

40% of the operators are doing it as a side job, or plan to go full time but aren’t quite there yet. Only 16% of the account surved were part of media agencies.

What are their prospects?

The data reveals that 71% of the operators are actively looking for investment or might do so in the future.

This reveals that “Self-published-media” is, if anything, more similar to startup culture than it is to traditional media culture.

How much money do they make?

However, these social media accounts are for the most part unprofitable. 84% of them make less than 10,000 RMB per month. Only a tiny percentage (0.5%) makes more than 1M RMB per month

This statistic shines a light over the fact that, although we hear much about large WeChat accounts charging 30k RMB and above for each of their native ads, this represents a tiny portion of accounts and most of them are actually struggling to monetize.

The majority of accounts are using either WeChat native ads (31.7%) or KOL advertising (24.5%) as a way to monetize

What does their life look like?

Most of account operators are mostly struggling with continuously producing content (47%) and defining their business model (26%, which makes sense given the trouble we saw they have monetizing).

Only a small fraction (5%) is considering finding investment as their main struggle.

“Self-media” also turns out to be a challenging job: nearly 50% of the operators work more than 8 hours per day, 18% of them more than 11 hours per day, and 41% of them do overtime every day or nearly every day.

What do they plan to do next?

Most encouragingly, most of “Self-media” social media account operators seen content with their lot: 60.2% are happy to keep on with it next year, and 84% overall are planning to stay in the industry next year.

Conclusion

This reports shine new light on people operating social media accounts in China:

• They make less money than we would expect (84% make less than 10k a month)
• They have high hopes for the future (71% are considering looking for investment)
• And, less surprisingly so, they work really really hard…

 

… and so do we, to bring you the best content about social media in China out there, hope you like this report!