The (Short) Tale of My Blurry WeChat Photo
In my earlier article about the 8 billion hongbao, or ‘red envelopes’, exchanged on Chinese New Year’s Eve, I touched upon the ‘Blurry Photo’ feature that was an interesting marketing angle WeChat decided to go with this year. Here’s a quick explanation:
Basically, users received one opportunity to upload a photograph to their WeChat Moments (a feature similar to the Facebook Feed) that would be made deliberately blurry to those viewing it. The user had to take the opportunity within 30 minutes (it was a one-time thing), upload a photo with a teasing caption, and send it to their Moments. Their friends then had to offer amounts of money, inside ‘golden red envelopes’ in order to see the photo. Any amount was OK, and upon sending the amount, the friend could then view the actual photo.
So what was the experience like? Well, here were my results:
Not great. Only two people bid to see the photo, making me a total of CN¥ 1.85, or roughly US$ 0.28. To be fair, I received my golden opportunity very late in the evening (around 10:30pm) when the excitement had already tapered off.
How did the feature do generally? WeChat says that there were 192 million ‘interactions’ taking place over 29 million Blurry Photos. The individual with the highest amount of activity paid to see 219 of her friends’ photos, and the most viewed photo received 519 bids. Moderately successful.
Whether or not WeChat tries this out again next year is anyone’s guess. But it was fun while it lasted.
And what was hidden underneath my Blurry Photo? Just don’t laugh…
I was young, I was stupid…
Read the original article here.
This post was imported from my Medium, which I used for blogging between 2015 and 2019.
