Doubao joins the Spring Festival AI red envelope battle
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It's Byte Doubao's turn to play their hand.
On February 10, Doubao, under ByteDance, announced the official launch of the “Doubao New Year” Spring Festival event. During the event, users will receive New Year red envelopes, and over 100,000 tech gifts powered by Doubao’s large model and cash red envelopes will be given away during CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala on New Year’s Eve in 2026.
This means that after Alibaba Qianwen’s 3 billion yuan “Spring Festival Treat Plan,” Tencent Yuanbao’s 1 billion yuan cash red envelopes, and Baidu Wenxin Assistant’s 500 million yuan red envelopes, the fourth heavyweight player in the AI red envelope war has officially entered the fray.
As the marketing expenses of major Internet companies have exceeded 4.5 billion yuan, the competition for AI entry points has reached unprecedented intensity.
Giants Bring Differentiated Strategies to Spring Festival
The Spring Festival is the most socially interactive and longest online period for Chinese users and has always been a key window for Internet products to acquire new users. From WeChat’s red envelope “Shake” integration with payment scenarios during the 2015 Gala, to user growth driven by collect card activities in short video apps in 2022, the leveraging effect of holiday scenarios on user habit cultivation has been repeatedly validated.
The core feature of this AI red envelope war is “AI empowerment + ecosystem linkage,” and the design of the giants’ strategies is heavily marked by their unique ecosystem DNA.
The first shot in the Spring Festival AI entry war was fired by Tencent Yuanbao.
Tencent Yuanbao invested 1 billion yuan in cash red envelopes, with the event running from February 1 to February 17. Tencent's Chairman and CEO, Pony Ma, stated at an internal staff meeting: “We hope this move can recreate the WeChat red envelope moment from 11 years ago.”
Yuanbao’s red envelope gameplay is deeply linked with the WeChat and QQ social ecosystems, forming a combination of “social fission + AI interaction + cash incentive.” Fourteen hours after launch, Yuanbao topped the Apple App Store free chart, surpassing Doubao, which had held the lead for a long time.
After Yuanbao red envelope links became widespread in WeChat groups, Alibaba Qianwen couldn't sit still either.
On February 6, Qianwen launched the first wave of the “Spring Festival 3 Billion Yuan Free Plan”: all users who update Qianwen App to the latest version can directly receive a 25 yuan no-threshold free coupon, applicable to more than 300,000 milk tea shops nationwide, and also for Taobao flash purchases of holiday goods and ordering takeout. Nine hours after launch, AI orders on Qianwen App exceeded 10 million.
As the officially announced highest-investing giant, Qianwen’s strategy isn’t just simple cash subsidies, but deeply binds AI red envelopes with its own commercial ecosystem.
Doubao, which had earlier officially connected to the Gala and was previously a market leader, originally adopted a more stable strategy, but has now joined the battleground early.
Doubaodivides the event into two phases: the first is interactive experience prize draws and red envelopes before the Spring Festival; during the Gala, combined with live interaction, the second phase starts with red envelope and tech gift prize draws.
It’s reported that Doubao’s “tech gift packs” include Yushu robotsusage rights, Tuozhu 3D printers, DJI drones, and other cutting-edge technology products, as well as smart consumer goods like XGIMI projectors and Supor rice cookers. The tech gifts also include usage rights for SAIC Audi E5 Sportback and Mercedes CLA electric cars.
This further highlights its differentiation from Tencent Yuanbao and Alibaba Qianwen.
Strategic Card Placement for Next-Generation Traffic Distribution Rights
From payment platforms to short video platforms, in the past decade, almost every reconstruction of Internet traffic has been accompanied by a Spring Festival red envelope war. However, this round is not a simple short-term drive for new users: as mobile Internet traffic approaches its peak, tech giants hope to leverage AI to find new entry points and establish new growth curves.
Industry consensus forecasts that in the future, general AI Agents can aggregate more specialized apps, and each user may only need a few AI Agents to meet all their online needs.
This means the landscape for Internet traffic entry points may break, and whoever occupies the AI era traffic entry will control the distribution rights for digital traffic of the next decade.
From current actions of each company,the essence of the Spring Festival AI red envelope war is giants betting on different “AI entrance forms.”Specifically,Baidu takes the “Search + AI” integration path; Tencent relies on its social DNA; Alibaba focuses on e-commerce scenarios; ByteDance uses entertainment-style interactions—each path shows their own ecosystem DNA.
Meanwhile, this AI entry Spring Festival red envelope war is also pushing the upgrade of AI competition.
The 2026 Spring Festival red envelope war marks China’s AI industry entering a new stage: from the first stage (2023-2025) “Hundred Model War” of technical catch-up, to the second stage (2026-Future) “Entry War” of ecosystem competition.
Currently, AI assistants have become similar in basic capabilities, shifting the competition focus to ecosystem collaboration ability, scene depth binding, and business model validation.
Baidu Wenxin Assistant connects Meituan and JD.com through an open ecosystem; Alibaba Qianwen deeply binds to e-commerce transactions; Tencent Yuanbao explores AI in social; ByteDance focuses on content creation—these differentiated paths are reshaping the value distribution across the entire industry chain.
The explosive growth of Yuanbao DAU is directly passed to the computing power infrastructure layer. Deng Conglin, head of Alibaba Cloud infrastructure, said: “To calmly face the likely instant traffic spike from Qianwen, Alibaba Cloud has prepared sufficient and flexible AI computing power.” This upstream effect is driving the coordinated development of the entire AI industry chain.
For the industry, the traffic growth from red envelope events is just the beginning; the real test comes after the holiday.
In 2019, Baidu appeared at the Spring Festival Gala for the first time, spending 900 million yuan on red envelopes, creating a record of 20.8 billion interactions that pushed Baidu APP’s daily active users from 160 million to 300 million. But after the celebration, reports from third-party data agency QuestMobile showed that the new users brought by Baidu's red envelope event had only a 2% seven-day retention rate.
Therefore,balancing short-term celebration and long-term value becomes crucial.Citi’s research reportpredictsthat high-frequency usage can cultivate habits and significantly improve retention; butrisks include “freebie seekers” uninstalling, and function homogenization lowering migration costs. Historically, the retention rate for internet products after Spring Festival events has usually been in the15%-25%range; whether AI assistants can break this bottleneck will decide the ultimate direction of this “entry war.”
The battle to seize market share for AI-to-C products has begun. This Spring Festival red envelope war is just the opening act of the AI mass adoption era. When the smoke clears, the real competition is only just beginning—the protracted war over the AI ecosystem has started.
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