A Chinese artificial intelligence chatbot owned by ByteDance achieved a major milestone during the country’s Lunar New Year festivities, reaching more than 100 million daily users and outpacing rival tech companies in a fierce competition for market dominance.
The Doubao application hit the 100 million user mark on February 16, representing a fourfold increase from early February numbers, according to Wednesday data from AICPB.com, a firm that monitors Chinese AI chatbot performance.
China’s Spring Festival, which officially started February 15 and continued for nine days, has evolved into a crucial battleground for the nation’s technology giants to showcase their consumer AI products and capture public attention through expensive marketing blitzes.
ByteDance’s success appeared linked to a strategic collaboration with CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala, among China’s most popular television broadcasts, which aired on February 16. During the program, Doubao processed more than 1.9 billion AI-generated inquiries, ByteDance reported.
Meanwhile, Alibaba invested 3 billion yuan ($436.95 million) promoting its Qwen chatbot through subsidized purchases of products like bubble tea ordered through the application. Despite this substantial spending, Qwen’s daily active users peaked at just 30 million on New Year’s Eve, marking the lowest performance among the three competing chatbots surveyed. Early February data showed Qwen had fewer than 10 million daily users.
Tencent launched a promotional effort for its Yuanbao chatbot featuring a 1 billion yuan coupon distribution campaign. This strategy helped the application grow steadily from 20 million daily users in early February to a maximum of 50 million on February 16, survey results indicated.
Representatives from ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent did not provide immediate responses to requests for comment from Reuters.
Following their holiday peaks, all three applications experienced declining user numbers, with Yuanbao showing the steepest decrease after its promotional campaign concluded. Qwen demonstrated the smallest user drop and maintained 22 million users by February 21.
“Doubao gained the most visibility through the Spring Festival Gala, Yuanbao attracted users quickly with cash incentives, but both face user retention challenges after the holiday peak,” AICPB stated. “Qwen, however, showed the strongest retention by focusing on practical, everyday use cases.”
Before the holiday period, Alibaba announced the addition of AI agent capabilities to its Qwen application. Users ultimately placed approximately 200 million orders for various items including eggs, flight tickets, and bubble tea through the platform during the festival season, AICPB data revealed.
