Firms charged 300 yuan annually to have WeChat accounts verified

Companies running "public subscription" accounts on Tencent Holdings' popular WeChat smartphone application are now being charged 300 yuan a ($49.41) year to upgrade their accounts to "verified" ones, the Internet firm said Wednesday.

Having started from this Tuesday, the 300 yuan annual fee is being charged by third-party institutions, which were hired by Tencent to verify the accuracy of documents provided by the companies and organizations that have applied to get a "verified" public subscription account, according to a statement the company e-mailed to the Global Times Wednesday.

With a "verified" account, companies and organizations can offer their subscribers "more diversified information and better user experiences," since they will be able to freely adjust the content and style of their menus, Tencent said.

WeChat, which had 270 million active users according to the company in November, allows users to share text, picture and video messages via smartphones.

There are more than 2 million public accounts on WeChat as of November, and 8,000 new accounts are being registered each day, Zhang Ying, deputy manager of WeChat's product development department, was cited as saying in a Beijing Business Today report Wednesday.

Feng Lin, an analyst at China E-Commerce Research Center, told the Global Times Wednesday that the 300 yuan fee will not deter companies and organizations from getting verification and will likely add vitality to WeChat's public community.

Tencent said in the statement that the third-party verification institutions will not charge the government, non-profit organizations and charity groups the fee, in order to attract more such entities to WeChat and to support their development.

Feng, however, doubted if any third-party institutions will be able to perform the complicated online and offline verification processes for under 300 yuan, without compromising the quality of their verifications.

"A 300 yuan fee is really low considering the huge pool of applicants and the verification institutions' labor and time cost spent in talking with the applicants' management and checking their business registration documents," he said.