WeChat Wraps Up 2016 With Over Billion Hours of Use Daily

(Guangzhou) — Users of the WeChat mobile messaging platform are spending more than 1 billion hours online each day for activities as diverse as chatting and paying for goods, as owner Tencent Holdings Ltd. spends heavily on promotions with the hope of eventually earning big profits.

A staggering 768 million people on average accessed their WeChat accounts each day in September — a figure more than double the population of the U.S. and more than half of all people in China, according to a report released by Tencent at a WeChat conference on Wednesday. About half of those users were on the service for 90 minutes or more each day, the report said.