From Yuanbao's 1 billion new users, looking at Tencent's "user posture" rapid turn

Song He/Wen

Starting from February 1, Tencent's 1 billion yuan promotional red envelope quickly spread across various WeChat groups, allowing users to participate in the sharing by simply clicking on the red envelope to enter the Yuanbao App.

When waking up in the morning, one would find that WeChat groups, Moments, and public account messages were flooded with strings of "Yuanbao codes" and "share links," turning familiar social networks into temporary red envelope venues, with some group owners even having to step in to maintain order and request members to stop sharing.

The phenomenon of red envelopes everywhere appears particularly abrupt when viewed through Tencent's product logic.

Because product experience has always been the most cherished foundation for WeChat and Tencent. Ten years ago, when it had just stabilized as a national-level application, Zhang Xiaolong and others were not thinking about what fancy features could be added to WeChat, but rather, "it takes up too much of the user's time."

From a product logic perspective, Tencent and WeChat have always aimed to do less but more accurately, trying not to disturb users, in exchange for long-term trust and attention from users. Even the opening of WeChat advertising is done with caution, and any minor changes or innovations must go through lengthy experiments, internal testing, and gray testing.

This set of product methodology's compound accumulation has allowed WeChat to gradually complete its moat over time, forming an irreplaceable user stickiness from functionality to ecosystem.

However, it must be noted that the current approach of Yuanbao to attract new users seems to be drifting away from the original product logic of "not disturbing users."

Now that the red envelopes have been distributed, the Yuanbao team is even still in gray testing. This "first traffic, then product" approach indeed does not resemble Tencent's DNA, but it may also be a helpless choice in the face of fierce competition from AI.

This is not a betrayal of product values, but more like a strategic pivot in response to the high-speed competitive environment of the AI era.

AI, as a new layer of interaction, competes for user mindset and preferred entry points. If one cannot pull users into their own scene during the remaining window period, it may never be possible to regain that opportunity. It can be imagined that compared to the late-starting video accounts of Douyin and Kuaishou, even if they later scaled up, the handover of massive user time and window likely brought profound anxiety and reflection to Tencent.

In this urgent pivot, Tencent has at least incurred unprecedented costs on the product side that exceed the 1 billion yuan in cash.

The first is a compromise on the restraint of "not easily disturbing users." The red envelope war 12 years ago did not require link redirection; all interactions occurred within the WeChat tool, and the adhesion to social attributes made this product a kind of Pareto improvement. This time, however, the red envelopes, codes, and group-fission communication created more noise, eroding the sense of tranquility in WeChat scenes, while the red envelopes can be seen as a form of compensation to users.

The second is the reorganization of originally relatively independent social links. In product design, Yuanbao has for the first time integrated the two social matrices of WeChat and QQ, which is a rare cross-chain collaborative effort. This not only brought stronger traffic pressure but also essentially released the underlying user ecological resources, indicating Tencent's significant emphasis on this initiative But why is Tencent in such a hurry?

Because AI is not a single-point function; it is destined to reshape the interaction logic between people and products, applications in the future. Once a certain assistant makes actions like searching for information and generating content the default option, the migration cost brought by user operation habits is enormous. Therefore, it is far better to pull people in first and let habits and mindsets take the lead than to wait until the product experience is perfected and sufficiently good before promoting it.

The biggest competitor for this entry must be Doubao, whose product strength is impressive, but it should also be noted that Douyin, with 1 billion monthly active users, has long seamlessly directed traffic to Doubao.

Doubao currently has around 200 million monthly active users. Based on an estimated total of 1.1 billion internet users, there is still a gap of at least 700-900 million for the AI entry, this is the remaining space that Yuanbao can accelerate towards.

Therefore, the root of this sudden shift in user posture is Tencent's strategic expression of the urgency and necessity for the AI entry.

It is precisely because Tencent has built a sufficiently high moat through network effects in social media that it has the confidence to practice long-termism on the user side. However, it may now deeply feel that the AI window is short and the competitive landscape is brutal, which is why it chooses to exchange traffic for time and use short-term stimulation to compete for long-term entry.

Of course, what ultimately matters is whether short-term user acquisition can be converted into long-term stickiness, relying on whether Yuanbao can retain users actively through product value itself. If it fails, it will only become a purely traffic-driven monetization.

In a national-level application like WeChat, such a phenomenon-level mobilization is difficult to initiate repeatedly; otherwise, WeChat is destined to deviate from its product image of "not easily disturbing users," which would be a loss for Tencent