Major Chinese technology companies spent heavily to promote their artificial intelligence (AI) chat applications during the 2026 Lunar New Year holiday. Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance invested tens of billions of yuan (several billion US dollars) in marketing campaigns for their AI products—such as Tongyi Qianwen, Yuanbao, and Doubao. These promotions relied on incentives such as digital red-packet rewards and special holiday activities to attract users, temporarily driving large spikes in downloads and daily active users across multiple platforms.
However, user engagement declined sharply once the holiday promotions ended. Industry data suggests that more than 80 percent of users stopped using the apps after the incentives disappeared, leaving an estimated 30-day retention rate of only about 12–13 percent. Many users reportedly joined primarily to collect promotional rewards rather than to use the AI tools regularly, highlighting the difficulty of converting short-term promotional traffic into sustained engagement.
The trend suggests, as analysts argue, that the long-term success of AI products cannot rely on financial incentives alone. Instead, it depends on factors such as model capability, reliability, and integration within broader digital ecosystems.
Source: Epoch Times, February 28, 2026
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/26/2/27/n14707559.htm