From 1 billion yuan in incentives for new users, see how Tencent's "user stance" shifts rapidly

Songhe / Author

Starting from February 1, Tencent Yuanbao’s 1-billion-yuan promotional red envelopes have rapidly spread across various WeChat groups. Users only need to click on the red envelope and enter the Yuanbao App to participate in the division.

When you wake up in the morning, you’ll find WeChat groups, Moments, and official account comments flooded with “Yuanbao password phrases” and “sharing links.” Networks of acquaintances are pulled together into temporary red envelope venues one after another; some group owners even have to step in to maintain order and ask members to stop sharing.

The phenomenon of red envelopes everywhere looks especially abrupt when viewed through Tencent’s product logic.

Because product experience has always been the core value most cherished by WeChat and even Tencent. When WeChat first became a national-level app a decade ago, Zhang Xiaolong and his team weren’t thinking about adding fancy features, but rather, “it already occupies too much of users’ time.”

In terms of product logic, Tencent and WeChat have always aimed to do less but do it well, minimizing disturbance in exchange for users’ long-term trust and attention. Even opening up WeChat advertising is done with utmost caution, and any minor innovation or tweak must undergo lengthy experiments, internal testing, and gray releases.

The accumulated returns of this product methodology have allowed WeChat to gradually fill out its moat both functionally and ecologically over time, forming irreplaceable user stickiness.

But it must be acknowledged that Yuanbao’s current new-user acquisition approach seems to be gradually diverging from the original “don’t disturb users” product philosophy.

Now the red envelopes are sent out first, while Yuanbao Party is still in gray testing. This “traffic first, product later” approach already doesn’t look much like Tencent’s usual style, but it might also be an unavoidable choice in the fierce AI competition facing the company now.

This is not a betrayal of product values, but more a strategic pivot under the fast-changing competitive environment of the AI era.

As a new interaction layer, AI is fighting for users’ mindshare and the default entry point. If you don’t pull users into your ecosystem during the remaining short window, you may never win them back. One can imagine, compared to WeChat Channels—which started late in response to Douyin and Kuaishou—even if it eventually grew in scale, Tencent must have experienced deep anxiety and reflection as it let massive amounts of user time and entry points slip away.

This urgent pivot has cost Tencent on the product side something even greater than 1 billion yuan in real money—a kind of unprecedented cost.

First is compromising on the restraint of “not lightly disturbing users.” The red envelope wars 12 years ago didn’t require link hopping; all interactions occurred inside WeChat, and the sticky social attributes turned the product into a kind of Pareto improvement. This time, however, Yuanbao red envelopes, passwords, and viral group sharing instead create more noise, eroding the tranquil feeling of the WeChat setting, with the red envelopes serving as a form of user compensation.

Second is restructuring originally relatively independent social pathways. In its product design, Yuanbao Party, for the first time, connects WeChat and QQ’s respective social networks for joint use—an unprecedented cross-network linkage effort. This not only brings much stronger traffic redirection pressure, but basically hands over buried social ecosystem resources, showing Tencent’s utmost importance attached to this initiative.

But why is Tencent in such a hurry?

Because AI is not a single-point feature—it will inevitably reshape the interaction logic between people and products/apps. Once an assistant makes actions like information lookups or content generation the default option, users’ operational habits create huge switching costs. Waiting for product experience to be perfected before a full launch is far less effective than pulling users in first—letting habits and mindshare come before actual refinement.

The main competitor for this entry point will undoubtedly be Doubao, whose product is strong, but note that Douyin, with 1 billion monthly active users, has been funneling traffic seamlessly to Doubao for quite some time.

Doubao’s monthly active users are currently just over 200 million. According to the total base of 1.1 billion netizens, there’s still a 700–900 million gap for AI entry points. This is Yuanbao’s remaining space to accelerate and sprint.

So, the ultimate reason for this sharp user stance shift is Tencent’s strategic expression of urgency and necessity regarding the AI entry point.

Precisely because Tencent previously built a high enough moat through social network effects, it could afford to practice restraint and long-termism on the user side. Now, sensing the brevity of the AI window and the cruelty of the competitive landscape, it chooses to trade traffic for time and use short-term incentives to fight for long-term entry points.

Of course, what ultimately matters is whether short-term user acquisition can convert into lasting user stickiness—whether Yuanbao’s own product value can make users willingly stay. If it fails, this will only become a pure traffic-burn exercise.

With a national-level app like WeChat, such a phenomenon-level user mobilization is extremely difficult to launch again and again. Otherwise, WeChat is destined to deviate from the “don’t lightly disturb users” product image, which would be a major loss for Tencent.

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