The red envelope war is over, and the Spring Festival prime time is becoming a waste?

In previous years, the Spring Festival Golden Week was a time when major Internet companies would come together to hold large-scale activities, but this year it was unusually low-key. Is the red envelope war gradually becoming a waste of time? What does the Spring Festival Golden Week mean to Internet companies? What will the Internet pay more attention to in 2023? This article analyzes them one by one.

In previous years, the Spring Festival was a golden week for Internet companies to take collective action and hold major events.

The earliest competition was for the sponsorship of CCTV's Spring Festival Gala. WeChat Pay became famous in 2015. Alipay became aware of this and won the exclusive sponsorship of the 2014 Spring Festival Gala at all costs. Since then, the sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala has been fought over by Internet companies, with the highest amount climbing to 4 billion yuan. Starting in 2016, major Internet companies that did not get exclusive cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala also began to send red envelopes on their own super apps, setting off a Spring Festival red envelope war.

Especially in 2021, Kuaishou first offered a total red envelope amount of 2 billion yuan, then Baidu offered 2.1 billion yuan, and Douyin added another 100 million yuan to reach 2.2 billion yuan. The open and secret competition was very lively.

However, the situation is slightly different for the 2023 Spring Festival. There are still nine days before the Spring Festival Gala, and the exclusive interactive partner has not yet been announced. Tech Planet asked major Internet companies and received responses that they are not title sponsors. It is rumored that two of the six sponsors are video platforms, but judging from the time preparation, it is almost impossible.

At the same time, the amount of red envelopes issued by various APPs has also been greatly reduced. Except for Kuaishou, which has announced a 2 billion red envelope distribution, other APPs have taken slightly less action. According to statistics from Tech Planet, in 2023, the total amount of Spring Festival red envelopes announced so far is only 3.7 billion yuan.

In the past, the Spring Festival Golden Week was a collective battlefield for Internet companies in different fields. The common purpose of sending red envelopes, collecting five blessings, putting together lucky bags, and collecting cards was to attract new users. The peak was in 2021, with 500 million Weishi, 500 million Alipay, 2 billion Douyin, 2.1 billion Kuaishou, 2.2 billion Baidu, and 2.8 billion Pinduoduo. According to incomplete statistics, the total amount of Spring Festival red envelopes that year was as high as 12.2 billion yuan. In 2022, even if it is reduced, it is still 8 billion yuan.

During the 2023 Spring Festival Golden Week, Internet companies were unusually low-key.

1. Low-key Spring Festival prime time

The sponsorship of the 2023 CCTV Spring Festival Gala has not been officially announced yet. In previous years, the sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala was announced two months before the Spring Festival. Similar to JD.com becoming a partner of the Spring Festival Gala in 2021, many employees were told that they would have to work overtime during the Spring Festival.

As for 2023, it has not yet been determined which Internet company will "work overtime". JD.com, Meituan, and Pinduoduo were rumored to be involved. According to Tech Planet's communication with industry insiders, JD.com will definitely not take over. Meituan needs to showcase its corporate image, but the Spring Festival is not the peak period for takeout. Although Pinduoduo sponsored CCTV and Bilibili's New Year's Eve this year, it has withdrawn from the Spring Festival Gala midway and is unlikely to win the sponsorship.

It is unlikely that companies like Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu, which have won exclusive interactive cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala, will sponsor the show again. This also means that after Tencent ended the 31-year history of traditional companies sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala in 2015, it failed to sponsor the show for 11 consecutive years like Midea Group did. Internet companies may have stopped sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala after only 8 years, and did not start a 10-year prosperity story.

The sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala may be an adjustment made by Internet companies in the context of "reducing costs and increasing efficiency", but the Spring Festival red envelope battle that is staged every year, the major Internet companies in 2023 are also very calm, and seem to be "lying flat", which is a bit unexpected.

At present, Kuaishou launched a 2 billion yuan Spring Festival red envelope activity on the App on January 4, which is comparable to the annual investment amount, and is considered a player with only a lot of volume. Compared with Douyin's 3.2 billion yuan to win the World Cup live broadcast rights, and Pinduoduo's multiple gold titles for CCTV and Bilibili's New Year's Eve Galas, Kuaishou, which has not made any big moves for a whole year, finally invested some resources in the Spring Festival Gala.

From the specific gameplay announced, Kuaishou held a number of activities including the Spring Festival cloud temple fair, the One Year and One Night Old Friends Gala, the Spring Festival K-singing Conference, the interactive gameplay of watching blockbuster movies from the Spring Festival Gala to red envelopes, the New Year live broadcast room blind date, and the Spring Festival recruitment meeting. Among them, the seven-star New Year group led by Jackie Chan and Jay Chou is expected to appear at Kuaishou’s own Spring Festival Gala - the One Year and One Night Old Friends Gala. Some netizens commented that with so many activities, 2 billion red envelopes are not too much.

For ByteDance, the investment is not large enough. In addition to participating in the activities of collecting solar term cards and sharing 200 million red envelopes on apps such as Toutiao and Xigua Video, Douyin also launched a separate red envelope search activity with a total prize of 400 million yuan. Although the amount is not much, Douyin tried to connect the "Find Red Envelopes/Collect Cards" column on the homepage of the APP. This important traffic entrance was previously the entrance to the World Cup. In order to encourage everyone to keep rushing, it is set that the first 500,000 people will have a 166 yuan red envelope. Judging from the scale of Douyin's daily active users exceeding 600 million, it is indeed a bit "too many monks and too little porridge."

Compared with previous years, Baidu Mobile is also very low-key. In 2023, it experienced the replacement of the number one position of Baidu Mobile, the adjustment of Baijiahao and Haokan Video, and the activities at the end of the year were not very fanciful. The slogan seen in the App Store is to share 800 million yuan together. Haokan Video, which celebrated its 5th anniversary, also launched a 300 million good luck card collection event.

As of press time, another major player has launched a Spring Festival event. On January 10, Alipay launched the Five Blessings event. The important gameplay change is that you can collect blessing cards in the live broadcast room, and more scarce zodiac cards have been added. What remains unchanged is that the total amount of the red envelope is still 500 million, and the red envelope award time is still 22:18 on New Year's Eve.

As for the major e-commerce platforms, they have not yet announced any Spring Festival activities. For example, JD.com and Tmall have updated the preview of the New Year Goods Festival, but the billions of red envelopes that users have been looking forward to are nowhere to be seen.

2. Is the red envelope war becoming a waste of time?

The Internet first valued the Spring Festival Golden Week because of the traffic it brought.

During the 2015 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the WeChat Shake to Grab Red Packets activity had over 11 billion interactions. This Spring Festival Gala event, which Jack Ma described as the "Pearl Harbor Raid", also planted seeds in the hearts of all Internet companies, and the Spring Festival Gala became a "totem" for leading Internet companies.

Alibaba was the leader from 2016 to 2018, Baidu in 2019, Kuaishou in 2020, Douyin in 2021, Pinduoduo at the beginning of 2022, and JD.com took over afterwards. In addition to Meituan, Internet companies have "eaten dumplings" one after another.

The traffic of the Spring Festival Gala is indeed unmatched. A report released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology pointed out that during the Spring Festival in 2022, mobile Internet access traffic reached 4.349 million TB, a year-on-year increase of 21.7%, and the growth rate has exceeded 20% for three consecutive years.

Many companies that have cooperated with the Spring Festival Gala have also realized the power of the Spring Festival Gala traffic. In 2018, the Spring Festival Gala sponsored by Taobao caused the huge traffic and transaction volume to crash the Taobao system. The technical director of the Taobao Spring Festival Gala project once lamented that "we really knew nothing about the power of the Spring Festival Gala."

In 2019, Baidu APP, with the help of the Spring Festival Gala, increased its DAU from 160 million to 300 million; in 2020, Kuaishou’s cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala also helped the former achieve the goal of reaching a peak DAU of 300 million.

At this point, the Spring Festival red envelopes have become a shot in the arm that works for everyone as the mobile Internet dividends gradually disappear. But soon, the effect of this shot in the arm was not so obvious.

Judging from the 30-day user retention rate after the Baidu Spring Festival Gala in 2019, the final retention rate was only 2%, and almost no daily active users of 100 million that day were left. A Pinduoduo employee told Tech Planet that they sponsored the 2023 CCTV and local TV New Year's Eve Gala, "After half a month of preparation, the entire transaction increase was not as large as Double 11."

To achieve growth, the Spring Festival Gala alone is not feasible. To revive a business, relying solely on Spring Festival red envelopes does not seem to work.

In 2018, ByteDance spent 1.6 billion to participate in the Spring Festival red envelope battle. Among them, the social APP Duoshan achieved a 74% month-on-month growth on February 4, making it the product with the largest growth in the entire ByteDance system.

In 2019, many Tencent businesses participated in the red envelope war. Not only did they launch customized red envelope covers on WeChat and QQ lucky bags, but they also spent 500 million red envelopes to divert traffic to its short video ecosystem, Tencent Weishi. Weishi's number of independent devices increased by 15.3% month-on-month, making it the growth king of all Tencent products.

Looking at it today, ByteDance’s Duoshan has been shut down, Tencent’s Weishi has been strategically marginalized, and products that were catalyzed by the Spring Festival red envelopes have not continued to thrive.

Gradually, many people realized that the growth of mobile Internet has also peaked. According to QuestMobile data, the number of domestic mobile Internet users has remained at more than 1.1 billion for four years since 2018. Since 2020, the number of monthly active users of China's mobile Internet has only increased by more than 10 million per month, with a monthly growth rate of only about 2%.

This means that the growth of super apps of Internet giants has peaked, and there is not much room for rapid growth of dark horse apps. This makes everyone realize that even with the stimulus of Spring Festival red envelopes, the story of growth myth is difficult to reproduce, let alone the expensive Spring Festival Gala sponsorship, the cost-effectiveness will be even worse.

Internet giants that are aware of the changing situation are now participating in the Spring Festival red envelope war and are no longer blindly paying for it themselves. For example, in Douyin's Warm Chinese New Year event, Junlebao is the core sponsor, and there are 5 other brand sponsors.

Nowadays, people no longer have the momentum to spend 4 billion yuan on the Spring Festival Gala, and they are more likely to treat the Spring Festival red envelopes as a regular means of operation. In 2023, Kuaishou, Alipay, and Baidu almost maintained the investment amount of the previous year. There is no big move, but it is just a normal activity festival, and the Spring Festival red envelopes have finally been demystified.

3. What will the Internet focus on in 2023?

Once upon a time, Spring Festival red envelopes became a necessary step for super apps to be tempered. From the cost-effectiveness of attracting new users, Spring Festival red envelopes were also a very efficient way compared to the daily cost of attracting new users of several hundred yuan per person. But as time went by, these things changed, and people began to think about the different purposes and meanings of Spring Festival red envelopes.

For example, Baidu's sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala in 2018 not only attracted new users for Sohu, but also helped to "vindicate" Baidu Smart Cloud. Because Baidu is different from e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and JD.com, it has its own "Double 11" high-traffic and high-concurrency scenarios. Baidu Smart Cloud needed the Spring Festival Gala to prove its cloud computing strength and become a benchmark case. Fortunately, Baidu Smart Cloud withstood the challenge and there was no downtime during the Spring Festival Gala that year.

Alipay will delegate the right to issue the Five Blessings card to merchants starting from 2021. Different merchants can activate private consumers by doing Five Blessings card activities. In 2023, resources will be further tilted towards merchants, and more than 30,000 merchants will become the protagonists of issuing blessing cards, and the scale of participating merchants is 30 times that of last year. Perhaps Alipay realizes that only when the ecological merchants are active can the goal of its digital life platform be achieved.

From Douyin's perspective, attracting new users is no longer an important indicator, and it hopes to further develop user consumption habits. The challenge path for finding red envelopes also includes live broadcast room recommendations. In addition, Douyin has set up levels for following back 2 fans for some challenges in the middle. It can be said that the idea of ​​enhancing Douyin's social interaction has not stopped.

Kuaishou has held a series of blind date and job recruitment conferences, paving the way for its rapidly growing blind date and blue-collar recruitment business. NetEase has cooperated with CCTV to hold a Metaverse sub-venue, hoping to let more users try out the Metaverse.

The Internet has also begun to enter a new cycle. From attracting new users to improving the ecosystem, the significance of the Spring Festival red envelope war has undergone a profound change. Under this idea, the Spring Festival red envelopes are no longer competing for the amount, and billions of dollars are rarely seen. For users, this may mean that there is less fun in grabbing red envelopes and the flavor of participating in the lottery together.

But it’s not all bad. Internet companies pay more attention to content innovation, gameplay innovation, and business improvement.

Back to the fourth day of the Chinese New Year in 2015, Jack Ma paced back and forth at Alibaba headquarters in Hangzhou, requiring several executives of the group to be on duty on the sixth day. Executives who were still on vacation set off to return, and then CEO Lu Zhaoxi and COO Zhang Yong hurriedly booked the nearest flight back to Hangzhou. Wu Yongming, then special assistant to Jack Ma, who was far away in Hawaii with his family, could not book a flight, so he directly chartered a plane to rush back.

What made Jack Ma anxious was the red envelope function launched by WeChat that year, which led to WeChat Pay gaining 30 million payment users in just one week during the Spring Festival, "achieving the same results that Alipay had achieved in ten years". After that, Alibaba fought back by sponsoring the Spring Festival Gala for three consecutive years, and expanded the payment war from e-commerce to online travel, local life and other aspects, setting off the most intense battle in the Internet with Tencent.

In 2023, after experiencing cost reduction, efficiency improvement and layoffs, the Internet industry may no longer have collective wars. Even no Internet company will need to "work overtime" collectively for the Spring Festival Gala's marketing campaign. The Internet can finally take a short break.

References:

• "Payment Wars: The End of the Internet's Biggest Battle" Latepost
• "Red Envelope Ecosystem War: Internet Giants' Spring Festival Gala Battle" iResearch Consulting
• "The Face and the Reality of the Spring Festival Red Envelope War" Photon Planet

Author: Yang Xiaohe

Source public account: Tech Planet (ID: tech618); focusing on cutting-edge Internet technology and new business.