Nobody looking at Tencent’s financial statements – with its continued double-digit revenue growth and 68 per cent gross margin – would come to the conclusion that the company needs to change its business model.

Third-quarter revenue at the Chinese internet company grew 55.1 per cent to Rmb5.2bn ($780m), compared with the same period last year.

And yet, the world’s third-largest internet company by market capitalisation is working on changes that will turn its traditional strategy upside down.

Tencent’s biggest asset is the huge user base served by QQ, its instant messaging tool – which had 638m active accounts at the latest count.

In the past the company focused on making sure that if these people spent money online, they would spend it on Tencent products. It has made efforts to provide its users with a variety of services including online games, news and social networking, making them less likely to leave the Tencent platform.

Now it is throwing open the door and inviting others into the party: Other companies can offer their games on Tencent sites, and third-party websites can push their feeds on to the Tencent platform.

The about-turn recognises the fact that social networking sites are changing the monetisation models in the internet industry in China, the country with the world’s largest internet population at 420m.

Sina, the company that runs the country’s largest online news portal and leading microblog, last month teamed up with MSN China, opening its microblog and Microsoft’s instant messaging tool in China to each other.

Sina also set up a developer fund for third-party application providers on its microblog.

Renren, a Chinese Facebook clone, is also aggressively expanding its open platform to include new third-party-developed products and new ways of linking to third-party sites.

The new initiatives mean different companies are sharing revenue streams. Sina, for example, has said it will give 70 per cent of revenues generated on its site from outside applications to the third party developers.

The reason the companies are willing to team up is the immense draw of social networking services.

Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China. But local rivals have seen a surge in the use of their services over the past two years. Sina said its microblog reached 50m users in October, barely a year after its start, and continues to grow rapidly.

In the US, the growth of social media has contributed to the development of online advertising, such as targeted ads on Facebook. In China, that has yet to happen.

“In the US, if your site generates a certain traffic you will actually be guaranteed an amount of money based on advertising, but in China [traffic] may not translate into revenue immediately,” Martin Lau, Tencent president, told the Financial Times. “That’s why a lot of companies go into gaming, go into value-added services so that you can charge the users.”

Currently, advertising accounts for just 7.3 per cent of Tencent’s revenues – the rest comes from value-added services, mostly games.

But executives across the Chinese internet industry are convinced that change is afoot.

“As the market evolves and the advertising market continues to grow, the situation that has been existing in the US can be replicated in China,” said Mr Lau. “The internet industry has grown to a certain stage in China that we can find enough talent and enough companies to provide differentiated services to users and that will actually constitute an ecosystem.”

Such change also means that the Chinese internet industry might come to resemble its US counterpart more closely.

China’s internet market now sees most of its revenues coming from users – through online games and similar services, while in the US advertising and e-commerce dominate as revenue sources. However, as the appearance of games on social networking sites is pushing US internet companies towards user-paid models, China is set to see a movement in the opposite direction.