Still going strong, WeChat’s monthly active users just shy of 1.1 billion in 2018

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.