Tencent owns 3 of the world’s 5 biggest social networks

The number of internet users on Earth recently surpassed three billion, and nearly half of them – 1.35 billion – are on Facebook, according to social media agency WeAreSocial. That’s roughly equal to the entire population of China.

Ironically, very few of Facebook’s users actually live in China, where the government has blocked the behemoth social network for several years. Tencent reigns supreme instead, taking up three of the top five spots for social platforms with the most monthly active users in the world.

WeChat, while it attracts the brightest spotlight from the west, actually has about half the users as its older PC-born brother, QQ Messenger. QQ has racked up 829 million users, while its Facebook-y MySpace-esque spinoff Qzone boasts an impressive 645 million.

The mobile-centric WeChat is growing much faster than both of its generation Q siblings, though. It sits in fifth place overall with 438 million monthly active users, still trailing Facebook-owned Whatsapp’s 600 million.

For the time being, Facebook and Tencent more-or-less peacefully coexist and haven’t posed any major threats to each others’ market share. Tencent sits cozy, protected by China’s Great Firewall, while Facebook sweeps up most of the rest of the world. That could soon change, though, as WeChat’s growth in China slows due to market saturation. Expect Tencent’s expansion beyond China’s borders to get more aggressive in the future.

Other honorable mentions from China on the list include Baidu Tieba, a social forum from China’s biggest search engine, and Weibo, the closest thing China has to Twitter. They have 200 million and 157 million monthly active users, respectively.

(Source: WeAreSocial)