WeChat official accounts may launch a paid subscription feature

At 11 o'clock last night, the well-known blogger Internet's Things posted on WeChat Moments:

WeChat public accounts have launched another killer feature: paid subscriptions.

Just last night, a screenshot of the homepage of the WeChat public account of "Sibianhua Entertainment" was leaked, and a "paid subscription" function module was displayed at the bottom of the screenshot.

So the editor immediately went to check the account, but the page showed that there was no such public account.

There is no relevant information when searching "Sibianhua Entertainment" on Baidu.

Afterwards, we discovered that the original WeChat public account "思变变娱乐" had been urgently renamed and cancelled. Judging from its previous historical message records, this was most likely an official WeChat paid test message.

The day before yesterday afternoon, a WeChat operator revealed that the reprint status bar in the original statement function in the background of the official account has been updated from the original "reprint allowed" to "paid subscription".

After clicking "Paid Subscription", it shows "Original reprint status: Reprinting is prohibited, and the whitelist function for paid articles is not available."

From all indications, WeChat official accounts will likely launch a paid reading feature, but the official has not yet responded. In fact, as early as 2015, there were media reports that WeChat official accounts planned to launch a subscription fee feature: account operators can require followers to pay for subscriptions, but it has not yet been implemented. With Zhihu and other platforms launching paid reading modules, this may have a certain reference significance for WeChat to start implementing this feature.

Interestingly, the editor posted a Weibo post about the paid subscription function of WeChat official accounts, and an interesting scene appeared:

This news was actually identified as commercial advertising information by Weibo. I wonder what WeChat thinks after seeing it.