ByteDance’s AI chatbot Doubao wins China holiday battle with 100 million users

By Che Pan and Brenda Goh

BEIJING, Feb 25 (Reuters) – ByteDance’s Doubao chatbot attracted over 100 million daily active users during China’s Lunar New Year holiday, winning an AI battle that saw the country’s largest tech companies spend billions to acquire new users, a private survey showed.

The Spring Festival is China’s longest and busiest holiday period, which officially began this year on February 15 and lasted for nine days.

It has become one of the most important periods for Chinese tech companies to launch campaigns to capture market attention and promote consumer-facing AI products.

The Doubao app surpassed 100 million daily active users (DAU) on February 16, about four times the levels seen in early February, according to data published on Wednesday by AICPB.com, which tracks the performance of Chinese AI chatbots.

The app was likely helped by its partnership with CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala, one of China’s most-watched programs which was broadcast on February 16. Doubao fielded over 1.9 billion AI-related queries during the show, according to ByteDance.

Alibaba, despite spending 3 billion yuan ($436.95 million) to promote its Qwen app by subsidising orders for items such as bubble tea placed via the app, saw the chatbot’s DAU peak at 30 million on New Year’s Eve, the lowest reading among the three chatbots in the survey. In early February, Qwen had less than 10 million DAUs, the data showed.

Tencent promoted its Yuanbao chatbot with a 1 billion yuan coupon giveaway campaign, which helped the app grow its DAU steadily from 20 million in early February to peak at 50 million on February 16, the survey showed.

ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comments.

All three apps, however, saw their DAU drop after the peak, with Yuanbao’s DAU falling the sharpest after its campaign wound down. Qwen suffered the smallest drop in DAU and had by February 21 managed to maintain 22 million users.

“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 said. “Qwen, however, showed the strongest retention by focusing on practical, everyday use cases.”

Alibaba announced before the holiday that it had added AI agent functions to its Qwen app. Users of the Qwen app eventually placed nearly 200 million orders for goods – including eggs, flight tickets and bubble tea – on behalf of users during the holiday season, AICPB’s data showed.

($1 = 6.8658 Chinese yuan renminbi)

(Reporting by Che Pan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)