Weekly Roundup: China's at it again

Wednesday's must read mobile stories WeChat vs. Apple In January 2017, Tencent introduced “mini programs” - lightweight apps that run inside WeChat. How do these apps work exactly? Imagine you need to catch a ride somewhere, instead of downloading the standalone Uber app, you can just pull up its mini program on WeChat in seconds. Well, Tencent just announced that WeChat has over 1 million of these mini programs - making its ecosystem half the size of Apple’s App Store. WeChat has 200M daily active users, a super impressive number considered that China has a total on 800M internet users. [TechCrunch has the story.]( Tencent once, Tencent twice Tencent is cutting the marketing budget of their gaming division due to regulatory disruptions and a slowdown in the Chinese economy. What are they doing exactly? They plan on cutting the branding budget for games that haven’t already been deployed, and also slashing spending on games that aren’t performing well or have had their release dates pushed back. Despite all these setbacks, Tencent still remains a profitable company and yesterday at their earnings release, they announced that their [third quarter profits jumped 30%](. [Read more on Bloomberg](. Mobile wins! Marketers are spending more on digital advertising this year than ever before. In the US, spending on digital advertising jumped an astounding 23%, to almost $50B in the first half of 2018. This puts the category on pace to hit $100B annually. Where is this spending coming from? Mobile ads, of course. Accounting for $31B in the first half of the year - climbing to 63% of total digital ad spend, compared to 54% during the same period last year. What’s driving this growth? Younger audiences’ adoption of new platforms like mobile video, audio, and social media. [Mobile Marketer has more insights.]( Deconstructor of Fun - [Dragalia List: Meet Nintendo’s new cash dragon]( Gamasutra - [Going the Distance: building a game and community over six years]( What's the future of in-game brand advertising? Hear from experts at Gameloft, Pixelberry Studios, ZeptoLab, and JamCity on what they have to say about brands moving in-game. [Watch the video!]( This email was sent to {EMAIL} [why did I get this?]( [unsubscribe from this list]( [update subscription preferences]( ironSource · 17 Bluxome St · San Francisco, California 94107 · USA