WeChat ran creator tips at scale years before Medium — until Apple shut it on iPhone

When Medium started translating claps into cash in 2017, Crunchbase News pointed at the ecosystem that had beaten it to market: WeChat, Tencent's all-in-one app with 889 million users as of Q4 2016 — more than half of China's population. Inside its subscription accounts, readers could tip writers any amount after a post. Introduced in 2015, the feature was gated: accounts carrying the 'original' tag — handed, in practice, to accounts putting out high-quality posts and engaging readers — got safeguards against plagiarism plus advanced widgets including commenting and the tip button.

The scale was real. Per the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, 10.7 percent of WeChat users had used tipping; among tippers, 37 percent gave one to ten yuan ($0.15 to $1.50) a month and 4 percent tipped more than 100 yuan ($15) — at least $52 million a month by the article’s math. Blogger David Zhu, with about 10,000 followers, said tips encouraged better writing, but only accounts updating daily with high-quality posts could become self-sufficient; one of his articles drew 15,374 clicks and 2,174.44 yuan (almost $330) in tips — for days of writing and editing.

Then Apple intervened. In April 2017, Apple forced WeChat to close the tipping feature on its iOS app: Apple's In-App Purchase guidelines forbid collecting funds through any system but its own. Writers patched workarounds — payment QR codes in posts, hopes for Android traffic — but book reviewer Can Yu told Crunchbase News her goal of subsidizing living costs 'fell through', and reader engagement dropped without the donation button.

Weeks before the article's publication, the standoff cracked: Apple updated its IAP guidelines to allow peer-to-peer donations, reopening the path for tips — as long as donations were optional and WeChat took no cut.

Gate the tip button behind an anti-plagiarism 'original' tag: quality earns property rights, property rights earn monetization — and there is no paywall anywhere.

Readers would not accept paywalls for casual reads, but a voluntary 1-to-10-yuan tip after a good post felt like gratitude, not purchase.

The 'original' tag made quality a property right before making it a revenue right, attacking plagiarism and monetization with one mechanism.

WeChat already owned the payments rails, so tipping needed no new user behavior beyond a tap.

Apple's IAP rules treated the tip button as commerce, triggering the platform conflict.

Voluntary tips can beat paywalls in a low-trust payments market — but a platform's monetization feature lives at the mercy of the hardware gatekeeper.

As of September 18, 2017, Apple had just updated its guidelines to allow peer-to-peer donations, with tips required to be optional and commission-free for WeChat; the change was widely read as fruit of Tencent CEO Pony Ma's recent meeting with Apple leadership. Writers awaited the button's return on iOS.