WECHAT, Tencent's popular instant messaging app, made public accounts pay-to-view on Feb 14. Beijing Youth Daily commented on Thursday:

It is good news for both original content creators and readers. The pay-to-view service not only transforms information into capital, but also by respecting the information demonstrates its value.

The pay-to-view service also gives users the right to choose. It means they can shield themselves from vulgar, bad, false or worthless information. All the information pollution wastes the public time, misleads and influences the public value systems.

This pay-to-view service can be regarded as an automatic purification of information. But the quality of the content is the premise for pay-to-view, which means the content must be king.

Pay-to-view has been a topic of public concern. But in reality, some people have realized the value of the service, and are willing to pay to view good quality content.

Up until now the public has no choice but to passively accept the public WeChat accounts which have multiplied in the past few years.

Now, with the pay-to-view function, it means people can view just the content they want. The new feature of the social media also gives the information provider a wake-up call that the broad-minded information can come to an end. A content-based, information supply is taking shape.

(China Daily 02/17/2017 page8)