ByteDance’s Douyin Overtakes WeChat in User Engagement: What It Means for Advertisers

A new Nomura reading of China's time-spent race put ByteDance's apps ahead of Tencent's for the first time. The gap is real — but part of it is an artifact of what gets measured, and Tencent's response to the finding has been narrower than it first appears.

Nomura's numbers, cited by Futu and picked up across Chinese trade press this week, are straightforward: in July, ByteDance's family of apps — Douyin (the China-only short-video app that is the domestic counterpart to TikTok), Doubao, Toutiao and the rest — captured roughly 40.9% of total time Chinese users spent on their top 50 apps, up from 33.6% a year earlier. Tencent's ecosystem, spanning WeChat, Honor of Kings, Sogou Input and Tencent Video, held 29.1%. WeChat still has more daily users than Douyin, 931 million to 714 million — but on raw time spent, it has been passed.

That's being read as evidence that WeChat's advertising business is losing ground across the board. It's a reasonable first read, and largely right. But the two apps' time gets counted the same way despite not being usable for advertising in the same way. A big chunk of Tencent's 29.1% comes from Honor of Kings match time and Sogou Input typing time — activities that, by design, don't carry feed-style ad slots the way a Douyin video scroll does. Stacking total minutes against total minutes, without adjusting for which minutes are actually sellable, flatters Douyin's advertising position and understates Tencent's — not because the underlying numbers are wrong, but because the comparison implicitly treats a Honor of Kings match and a Douyin scroll as economically interchangeable, when for advertisers they aren't.

That distinction matters for how much weight to put on the "WeChat is losing the ad war" reading. It doesn't erase Tencent's problem — Channels, WeChat's short-video and livestream commerce arm, is genuinely behind on monetization by any measure, official or third-party. But it does mean the 40.9-to-29.1 split is a noisier proxy for advertising competitiveness than the coverage around it suggests.

There's a second, smaller story sitting next to the time-share numbers. Tencent hasn't gone quiet in the face of this data — its communications team has kept talking. What it's chosen to talk about is narrower than the headline figure. In an October 2025 podcast appearance, WeChat's PR director said Moments — WeChat's Facebook-style feed — still draws about 780 million daily visitors and 120 million daily posters, and that those figures "have stayed fairly stable" in recent years. Those numbers are accurate as far as they go. They're also not the numbers most people are asking about. QuestMobile data from the same period shows daily Moments posting volume down 37% from its 2021 peak, with likes and comments down 27% and like-rates falling under 10%. Visitor counts holding steady while posting and engagement erode is a coherent pattern — a feed people still open out of habit but interact with less — but it's a different claim than "the data is stable," and it's not the comparison Nomura's new split invites.

None of this means Tencent is dodging the question dishonestly; companies routinely answer with the metric that reflects best on them, and reporters routinely let framing questions go unasked. But it's worth naming precisely what's being measured when Tencent says its numbers are stable, and what isn't being addressed by that answer — including, this week, the time-share figures putting Douyin in the lead for the first time.

References: Nomura research cited via Futu/PANews (July 2026 app time-share data); QuestMobile Moments engagement data (2021–2025, as cited in Chinese financial press); WeChat PR director podcast remarks, October 2025 (as reported in Chinese trade press).