Chinese New Year AI War Explodes! Doubao ByteDance Reaches 100 Million Daily Users

JAKARTA - The battle of artificial intelligence chatbots in China during the Chinese New Year holiday turned into an arena of burning money and strategy. As a result, ByteDance's Doubao soared far by penetrating more than 100 million daily active users. They left behind two giant rivals, Alibaba and Tencent.

Data released by AICPB.com on Wednesday, February 25, showed Doubao reached a peak of more than 100 million daily active users (DAU) on February 16, or about four times the number at the beginning of the month.

The spike comes right in the middle of the nine-day Spring Festival period starting February 15, a moment that has now become a golden opportunity for Chinese technology companies to showcase AI products to millions of consumers.

Doubao's app got a significant boost from its collaboration with the CCTV-broadcast Spring Festival Gala, one of the most watched television programs in China.

ByteDance said during the broadcast, Doubao received more than 1.9 billion AI-related queries. The figure is not just a statistic, but proof of how mass entertainment is combined with digital distribution to create a user explosion in a short time.

On the other hand, Alibaba through the Qwen application poured promotional funds of around 3 billion yuan or the equivalent of 436.95 million US dollars. Its strategy is in the form of subsidies for ordering goods such as bubble tea through the application. Even so, Qwen's DAU only reached a peak of 30 million on Chinese New Year's Eve, the lowest among the three chatbots surveyed. In early February, Qwen even recorded less than 10 million daily active users.

Tencent did not stay silent. The company spent 1 billion yuan in the form of a coupon sharing campaign to boost Yuanbao. As a result, Yuanbao's DAU rose steadily from 20 million in early February to 50 million on February 16.

But the euphoria did not last long. After the promotional period ended, all applications recorded a decline in users. Yuanbao experienced the sharpest decline after the coupon campaign was stopped. Qwen actually showed the strongest resilience. On February 21, Qwen still maintained around 22 million daily active users.

AICPB in its report stated, "Doubao gained the most visibility through the Spring Festival Gala, Yuanbao attracted users quickly through cash incentives, but both faced retention challenges after the peak of the holiday. Qwen showed the strongest retention by focusing on practical daily use. "

Ahead of the holidays, Alibaba announced the addition of an AI agent function to Qwen. During the holiday season, Qwen users placed nearly 200 million orders on behalf of them, ranging from eggs, plane tickets to drinks. This strategy shows a different approach: not just a conversational chatbot, but a transaction assistant integrated into the e-commerce ecosystem.

ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent have not responded officially to Reuters' request for comment.

Market-wise, this dynamic shows that the AI war of consumers in China is no longer just about the most sophisticated language model, but about distribution, economic incentives, and integration with digital lifestyles. Linking chatbots with national television shows, burning subsidies of hundreds of millions of dollars, or turning AI into a shopping assistant - all are expensive experiments to compete for user habits.

The question now is not who is the most viral during the long holiday, but who can survive after the Chinese New Year fireworks go out. In the digital economy, retention is king. And China's AI war has just entered a more serious phase.