ByteDance has bought time, but AI is erasing time.
Douyin has taken the throne of the mobile internet market.
Nomura's latest research report, citing data from QuestMobile, states that in July 2026, Douyin's total usage duration surpassed WeChat for the first time.
The duration share of the ByteDance ecosystem among China's top 50 apps also rose from 33.6% in the same period last year to 40.9%; the Tencent ecosystem's share dropped to 29.1%, widening the gap between the two sides to 11.8 percentage points.
This is not a simple case of "Douyin defeating WeChat".
From the dimension of covered population, WeChat still has 931 million daily active users, higher than Douyin's 714 million.
Douyin's overtaking is attributed to both a 19% year-on-year increase in daily active users and an 8% rise in the average daily usage duration per active user. WeChat remains the most widely covered digital infrastructure, while Douyin is becoming the largest attention entry point.
This data is ultimately based on the general background that stock penetration has hit a bottleneck.
There are fewer and fewer new users, and platform competition has gradually shifted from "who has more users" to "who can obtain more user time".
ByteDance no longer relies solely on Douyin to win this competition. Products such as Hongguo Short Drama, Fanqie Novel, Qishui Music and Doubao are undertaking users' content consumption in different scenarios.
The emergence of generative AI has added new supply capacity to this system.
But the impact of AI may go further than that: on the one hand, it makes content easier to produce, reinforcing ByteDance's strengths in recommendation and advertising models;
on the other hand, it may also complete searching, filtering and decision-making for users, making "longer usage duration" no longer the only standard for measuring platform value.
I
The Ferocious Growth of Hongguo
In less than a year, Hongguo has drawn a growth curve that cannot be ignored.
In July 2026, the daily active users (DAU) of Hongguo Short Drama reached 168 million, a year-on-year increase of 107%, exceeding the simple sum of DAU of the "iQiyi, Youku, Mango TV and Tencent Video" platforms.
Launched for about three years, Hongguo has become the fourth largest app by usage duration in China's mobile internet, second only to Douyin, WeChat and Douyin Speed Version. In July 2026, its duration share reached about 5%, surpassing Kuaishou's 3.9%.
While rapidly expanding its user scale, Hongguo has occupied a large amount of fragmented attention.
Data from QuestMobile shows that in February 2026, the monthly average daily usage duration per user of Hongguo reached 125 minutes, roughly equivalent to watching a complete movie every day.
No matter how modern people complain that their time is cut into fragments by work, it does not prevent them from investing a large amount of scattered entertainment consumption time in short-length plots with intensive conflicts and rapid development.
What Hongguo amplifies is not just the short drama format, but a free business model that has been verified within the ByteDance system.
Previously, mainstream mini-program short dramas mostly adopted the mode of unlocking episodes by payment and recharging to watch. After users finished the free part, they needed to make continuous payment decisions; the profit of producers also highly relied on traffic buying for promotion.
Hongguo reversed this logic: users watch the full series for free, the platform improves matching efficiency through algorithms, and then supports content supply with advertising revenue and revenue sharing system.
In other words, it first lowers the decision-making threshold of content consumption, and then realizes commercial monetization through a sufficiently large user scale and usage duration.
For the whole year of 2025, DataEye estimated that the market size of China's free micro-short drama market had reached 53.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 113%, accounting for about two-thirds of the real-person micro-short drama market.
Hongguo, which is backed by Douyin's traffic, has captured nearly 90% of the monthly active share in independent short drama app channels, forming an overwhelming leading position.
After users and distribution channels are in place, the emergence of AI has installed an accelerator for this model.
For free platforms, the core is to continuously provide low-cost, high-frequency content to compete for users' time. Compared with traditional film and television works, AI manhua dramas have a shorter production cycle and faster replication speed, significantly reducing the cost of trial and error.
Hongguo is one of the earlier platforms that actively promotes this batch of supply.
Earlier this year, the Short Drama Copyright Center of Douyin Group launched a new incentive mechanism for AI simulated human dramas, giving a minimum guarantee of 20,000 to 80,000 yuan according to different tiers, and uniformly enjoying 20% permanent revenue sharing.
The combination of "low cost + platform minimum guarantee" has rapidly boosted the production capacity of the supply side.
However, while production capacity expands, differentiation is also very obvious. Among the 47,000 new AI dramas and manhua dramas launched in March, 99.28% of the works had a monthly playback increment of less than 30 million, and only 0.11% exceeded 100 million.
After the supply pours in rapidly, the platform's strategy naturally shifts from "drawing supply" to "conducting screening".
In May, the industry spread the news that newly approved AI scripts would no longer be provided with minimum guarantee. Hongguo later clarified that it was not a "comprehensive cancellation", but clearly stated that only some high-quality scripts retained the minimum guarantee policy.
A practitioner in the AI drama production industry told Wall Street CN · All-weather Tech that Hongguo's per capita daily usage duration is still rising, possibly because "the dramas are getting longer and longer".
"It was very difficult to make 60 episodes at the beginning of the year, but now when we find an IP, we can easily extend it to hundreds or even thousands of episodes." The above practitioner said that in the past, producers worried that updates could not keep up with users' drama-watching pace, but now "the update speed is faster than users' watching speed".
When content production itself becomes cheaper and quantity is no longer scarce, what is really scarce becomes users' attention, as well as the ability that determines the efficiency of content distribution.
Hongguo's growth is a specific presentation of ByteDance's traffic and algorithm capabilities in the short drama field. When the track enters the stage of refined operation, this competition for time will naturally extend to the entire ByteDance system.
II
Traffic Fortress
The rapid rise of Hongguo is not the first time that ByteDance has successfully replicated the free model.
The premise for this strategy to work repeatedly is that ByteDance has built an extremely huge attention fortress in China's mobile internet.
In July 2026, Douyin's total usage duration surpassed WeChat for the first time, with a duration share of 19.4%; the total duration share of ByteDance's products in the top 50 apps further increased to 40.9%.
In a stock market where user growth is close to the ceiling, this huge traffic base means that derivative products in the matrix can obtain exposure, recommendation and cold start at extremely low costs.
Data from QuestMobile shows that in June 2026, Qishui Music's monthly active users reached about 167 million, a year-on-year increase of 68.7%; its daily active users in July still increased by about 70% year-on-year.
Against the backdrop of slowing or even declining growth of mature platforms such as QQ Music and Kugou, Qishui has become another high-growth entry point for ByteDance to acquire users against the trend.
It naturally undertakes the overflowing music consumption demand from Douyin: users first come into contact with song clips in short videos, and then are guided to enter Qishui to complete full listening.
After the traffic enters Qishui, it does not stop at a single attention migration. In addition to traditional advertising and membership services, ByteDance is extending the music system to distribution, copyright, promotion and revenue sharing settlement.
In June 2026, "Miaoxiang", an AI music creation and distribution platform under Qishui Music, was newly launched. After the works are completed, they can directly enter the distribution and dissemination link of Qishui Music.
This makes the attention accumulated by Douyin no longer just one-time sold advertising resources. It reduces the cost for Qishui to acquire users; and the growing Qishui has evolved into a new consumption entry point, undertaking multiple commercial values such as membership, copyright, distribution and promotion.
If Qishui Music expands the scenarios, Fanqie Novel demonstrates the vertical multi-level reuse of content assets.
In July 2026, Fanqie Novel had about 144 million daily active users, a year-on-year increase of 6%, the growth rate slowed down somewhat, but the per capita daily usage duration increased by 8% year-on-year.
Although new content formats such as AI manhua dramas have diverted part of the pure text reading time, for ByteDance, Fanqie's strategic value as an "upstream IP reservoir" has further risen instead.
Since the beginning of this year, Fanqie has continued to expand copyright opening.
In March, the Short Drama Copyright Center of Douyin Group launched the manhua drama IP adaptation library, opening more than 500,000 original Fanqie IPs to partners.
In May, Fanqie began to promote the theatricalization of AI animation, and planned to open the adaptation rights of head IPs; in June, it further launched the long-term solicitation plan for theatrical films.
Stories that have been verified in the text market can thus be naturally transformed into short dramas, AI manhua dramas and even movies — watched continuously on Hongguo, and then re-spread and amplified with the help of Douyin.
The diversion pressure for a single app is transformed into the multi-level release of IP assets within the ByteDance system.
However, this fortress built by content and traffic scale is essentially an in-depth excavation of supply-side efficiency and stock time. Under the background that mobile internet penetration has reached its peak, even a strong player like ByteDance is devouring the stock of the existing pattern.
When AI begins to change the product form and distribution logic in the next step, the winning hand of competition may no longer be determined by the absolute quantity of time and content.
III
Changes in the Final Outcome
The growth of Hongguo, Fanqie and Qishui is all based on the same logic: attract more users with more content, the longer they stay, the more advertising inventory the platform can sell.
From Toutiao to Douyin, ByteDance's most successful business models in the past are essentially the efficient organization and monetization of attention. The explosion of content supply brought by AI further amplifies this advantage in the short term.
But AI's reshaping of the internet ecosystem goes far beyond the content supply side.
This brings a fundamental deviation in the underlying logic between content products and AI assistants: content products need to continuously provide new consumption objects and try every means to retain users; while excellent AI assistants pursue to complete tasks in a shorter time.
The commercial value of a user obtaining reliable answers and completing an order in 30 seconds may be much higher than browsing pan-entertainment content for 30 minutes.
When AI begins to make decisions for users, the evaluation indicators of the platform also extend from daily active users and usage duration to task completion volume, transaction conversion rate, payment rate, performance reliability, and the scope of decisions that users are willing to hand over to AI for processing.
In July 2026, Doubao's daily active users have reached 168 million, about 4.6 times that of the same period last year. For pure C-end AI products, it is not easy to cover the model invocation cost for a long time only by the free model.
In addition to subscriptions, introducing high-intent demands into e-commerce and local life service transactions is becoming another commercialization path that ByteDance is testing.
Since March this year, Doubao has started gray-scale testing of direct order placing and payment in the app; in April, it launched "Doubao Helps You Choose", gradually covering product recommendation, price comparison, order placing and after-sales service, and upgraded it to a unified shopping entry point during the "618" period.
In the field of local life, the monetization path is more direct. In August, hotel orders generated through the Doubao entry began to charge independent channel service fees — the platform does not sell advertising spaces, nor does it provide paid priority ranking, but draws commissions according to real transactions.
This shift from "selling advertisements" to "facilitating transactions" has also put ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent back on the same track.
The three companies have different starting points, each representing a unique Agent infrastructure:
Alibaba deeply connected Tongyi Qianwen with Taobao, Taobao Flash Purchase, Fliggy and Amap this year, accessing 4 billion product and service interfaces into the unified AI, with the core of using the huge product supply chain and performance network to realize a direct closed loop from "demand proposal" to "payment and performance".
Tencent defines the WeChat ecosystem as the most suitable system for deploying Agents, trying to turn the existing service ecosystem into "Skills" that Agents can call with the help of over 1.4 billion monthly active users and millions of mini-programs.
ByteDance's advantage lies in its huge attention entry point and accurate understanding of user intentions, so as to divert traffic to its own e-commerce and local life business.
When users consume content, the richer the supply, the more time ByteDance can take away; but when AI begins to search, compare and execute for users, the value comes from saving time.
This does not mean that duration has lost its meaning.
The huge user scale and attention pool are still the largest upstream assets for promoting AI entry points and capturing user intentions.
But duration is retreating from the final commercial result to an upstream starting resource. The platform not only needs to own users' time, but also needs to prove that it can understand their intentions and complete actions for users.
From this perspective, the 40.9% duration share is not only ByteDance's peak in the mobile internet attention era, but also the starting point for the next round of competition on "efficiency and decision-making power".
This article is from the WeChat official account "All-weather Tech" (ID: iawtmt), written by Liu Yichen, and published with authorization by 36Kr.