ByteDance joins Alibaba, Tencent to offer freebies for AI app users

ByteDance’s Doubao app has launched a campaign offering over 100,000 tech products and red packets worth up to 8,888 yuan (US$1,300) as part of a Spring Festival giveaway, according to the company.

The campaign includes prizes such as robots, drones, and electric vehicles from brands like Unitree, DJI, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz, with winners receiving usage rights rather than ownership.

This move follows similar efforts by Alibaba and Tencent, which have allocated billions of yuan to cash and gift giveaways during the holiday period.

Alibaba’s Qwen app offered bubble tea and vouchers, leading to a surge in downloads that pushed it to the top of China’s Apple App Store.

Tencent committed 1 billion yuan (US$144.7 million) to its red packet campaign, while Baidu launched its own initiative with a 500 million yuan (US$72.3 million) prize pool.

🔗 Source: South China Morning Post

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Holiday giveaways serve as a land grab

These promotions echo WeChat Pay’s 2014 Lunar New Year red-envelope feature, which brought millions into its payment system 1.
Another driver is avoiding a repeat of the “DeepSeek shock,” when a smaller rival grabbed huge attention during the prior year’s holiday period 1.
Alibaba spent 3 billion yuan (~$431 million) on its Qwen campaign, which led to 10 million orders in nine hours and overloaded systems 2 1.
Tencent pushed its Yuanbao bot so hard that WeChat stopped Yuanbao links from opening inside WeChat, after complaints that the sharing tactics felt disruptive and harassing 3.

User acquisition race tightens giant control and shifts platform power

The fight goes past user counts. Companies want “super gateways” that handle shopping or travel, and serve as the entry to the broader ecosystem 4.
Only the biggest players can keep spending. An AI entrepreneur estimated ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent each run more than 100,000 GPU (graphics processing unit) cards 5.
At a conservative US$10,000 per card per year, that adds up to about US$1 billion annually per 100,000 cards 5.
AI assistants that work across apps could concentrate control with platform owners, who can set new rules that route around individual applications 5.
Large subsidies underline the monetization challenge. Companies bank on later revenue through advertising or e-commerce since many Chinese consumers do not have a habit of paying for subscriptions 1.