ByteDance’s Doubao Chatbot Surges to Over 100m Daily Active Users During Lunar New Year, Dominating China’s AI Holiday Battle

ByteDance’s Doubao chatbot achieved a remarkable milestone during China’s 2026 Lunar New Year holiday, surpassing 100 million daily active users (DAU) on February 16 — roughly four times its early-February levels — according to data published Wednesday by AICPB.com, a private tracker of Chinese AI chatbot performance.

The surge solidified Doubao’s position as the country’s dominant consumer-facing AI app during one of the world’s largest annual periods of family gatherings, social sharing, and digital engagement. The nine-day Spring Festival (February 15–23) has evolved into a critical strategic battleground for Chinese tech giants. With hundreds of millions of people returning to hometowns, spending extended time with family, and actively sharing content across platforms, the holiday offers an unparalleled window for viral adoption and real-world testing of new AI features.

ByteDance capitalized on this moment more effectively than any rival this year, turning Doubao into a shared holiday companion for families across the country. A major catalyst was Doubao’s high-profile partnership with CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala — one of China’s most-watched annual television events, with hundreds of millions of simultaneous viewers.

Doubao fielded over 1.9 billion AI-related queries during the February 16 broadcast, ByteDance reported. Viewers used the chatbot in real time to ask questions about performances, generate custom festive content, create personalized greetings, and engage in interactive conversations, driving massive usage spikes and embedding the app into the cultural fabric of the holiday.

Doubao’s Dominance vs. Rivals’ Costly Campaigns

The performance stands in stark contrast to competitors’ efforts. Alibaba’s Qwen app, despite a massive 3 billion yuan ($437 million) coupon giveaway campaign that subsidized food and drink orders placed directly in-chat, peaked at only 30 million DAU on New Year’s Eve — the lowest among major chatbots tracked by AICPB.com.

In early February, Qwen had fewer than 10 million DAU, highlighting the campaign’s limited ability to sustain engagement despite the enormous spend. Doubao’s lead is consistent with longer-term trends. Late December 2025 QuestMobile data showed Doubao with 155 million weekly active users — nearly double DeepSeek’s 81.6 million. The Lunar New Year performance likely widened that gap further, demonstrating ByteDance’s superior ability to integrate AI into culturally resonant moments.

This holiday battle reflects the intense competition in China’s consumer AI market. While global attention often focuses on U.S. leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic, the real intensity plays out domestically, where scale, cultural relevance, and cost efficiency determine winners. ByteDance’s dual release of Doubao 2.0 (agentic upgrade) and Seedance 2.0 (video generation) earlier in the week created a powerful one-two punch, combining conversational AI with creative tools at a time when families are actively sharing videos, greetings, and memories.

Doubao 2.0’s positioning for the “agent era” — enabling complex, multi-step real-world tasks rather than simple Q&A — proved particularly resonant during the holiday. Users leveraged it for practical assistance (travel planning, recipe suggestions, family game ideas) alongside entertainment, driving deeper engagement than pure chatbots.

ByteDance’s open-source strategy with parts of its Qwen family, combined with Doubao’s seamless integration into the broader ByteDance ecosystem (Douyin, TikTok, Toutiao), creates powerful network effects. The company’s ability to cross-promote across platforms gives it a structural advantage in user acquisition and retention that pure-play AI firms struggle to match.

Broader Implications for China’s AI Ecosystem

The Lunar New Year surge highlights several key dynamics shaping China’s AI landscape:

• Cultural integration as a growth accelerator: Holidays like Spring Festival amplify tech adoption through family sharing and collective experiences, a uniquely Chinese phenomenon that foreign competitors cannot easily replicate.
• Agentic AI gaining traction: Users increasingly expect AI to perform useful actions rather than just answer questions, favoring models optimized for multi-step reasoning and task execution.
• Domestic optimization amid U.S. restrictions: Chinese firms’ focus on cost efficiency and hardware optimization (running effectively on available chips despite export controls) has produced competitive, affordable models that resonate with mass-market users.
• Holiday as proving ground: The period serves as a real-time stress test for scalability, user experience, and viral mechanics — metrics that influence developer adoption, investor confidence, and long-term market positioning.

As China’s AI market matures, consumer-facing apps like Doubao are evolving into platforms for broader ecosystem plays — from e-commerce and content recommendation to agent-driven services in daily life. ByteDance’s holiday triumph strengthens its domestic moat while building momentum for international expansion, where Doubao and TikTok synergies could prove powerful.

With the holiday now winding down, the focus shifts to post-holiday retention and whether rivals can close the engagement gap through sustained innovation and promotions. Doubao’s 100 million+ DAU milestone during the Spring Festival has set a high bar for China’s consumer AI race in 2026 — a year that will likely see even fiercer competition for user attention, developer mindshare, and monetization pathways in the world’s largest internet market.