Whether it is under the time system of ByteDance or that of Tencent, what the people need is a time system that treats people as real human beings.

If an enterprise fails to make users better but instead makes them worse, no matter how high its market value is or how fast it grows, it is socially questionable.

1

A debate over time exposes the collective evasion of an entire industry

Recently, a highly influential public opinion battle has broken out in China's commercial sector.

Veteran media personality Qin Shuo published an article citing data from Nomura Securities sourced from QuestMobile, stating that in July 2026, among the top 50 apps by mobile internet usage duration in China, Douyin for the first time overtook WeChat with a 19.4% share compared to WeChat's 18.8%; the entire ByteDance ecosystem accounted for 40.9%, while Tencent's ecosystem took 29.1%. A year ago, these two figures stood at 33.6% and 30.9% respectively. From this, he put forward the view that China's internet is moving from the "Tencent Era" to the "ByteDance Era".

Two days later, Li Liang, Vice President of Douyin Group, posted several consecutive Weibo posts in fierce refutation. His remarks were sharp, starting with "extremely unrigorous, total nonsense", and later escalating to "either stupid or malicious". His reasoning was that the statistical caliber of the top 50 apps did not cover long-tail applications and PC terminals, and the report itself was marked as "tracking estimate"; besides, 41.8% is far from the one-half threshold required for presuming dominant market position under Article 24 of the Anti-Monopoly Law.

One side focuses on statistical caliber, while the other focuses on trends. By the end of the debate, the details of the data itself no longer matter. What is truly surprising is the sense of tension reflected in Li Liang's response. How could an enterprise that is at the peak of its financial performance and widely recognized as the most profitable player in China's internet industry react so strongly to the claim of "ranking first in user usage duration"?

In the past, what Chinese enterprises were most willing to promote was exactly this type of figure: how high the market share is, how broad the user base is, and how fast the growth is. But in today's internet industry, "occupying the longest user time" has become a title that no one is willing to claim. It can even be said that the real value of this debate is not about who wins, but that it brings a long-evaded issue to the table. When a company becomes the "King of Time", is it creating value for users or consuming them?

2

Why usage duration is no longer an honor

To understand this evasion, we must first understand what changes have taken place in the nature of the duration indicator.

In the early and middle stages of the internet, usage duration represented the possession of scarce resources. If a user was willing to stay one more minute in a product, it meant that he obtained information, connection, entertainment or efficiency here. The greater the value of the product, the longer the user stayed. That was the era when "duration equals value". But the problem today is that the duration indicator has been deliberately designed by enterprises.

Short videos, short dramas, and information feeds share a common feature in their technical paths: they do not satisfy existing demands, but generate new demands. Users do not have clear goals before opening the apps, and after opening, algorithms are responsible for creating goals one after another. A swipe brings new stimulation, and the next episode automatically plays after the current one ends. This is product design, not user choice. The average daily usage duration per user of Hongguo Short Drama reached 125 minutes in February 2026, with 168 million daily active users, exceeding the sum of daily active users of Tencent Video, iQiyi, Youku and Mango TV. An app takes up more than two hours of a user's day, which is no small number. After deducting time for work, sleep, commuting and meals, the time an ordinary person truly belongs to themselves may only be three or four hours.

To be fair, the ability to keep users engaged is itself an extremely strong product competency. ByteDance has reached the industry leading level in the precision of algorithm recommendation, the density of content supply, and the smoothness of playback experience. TikTok's performance in overseas markets has proved that this set of capabilities is not obtained by relying on the particularity of the Chinese market. Being able to occupy users' time is first and foremost a capability.

But capability and value creation are two different things.

The criteria for a society to evaluate enterprises should never only be "how strong it is", but "what kind of people it helps users become". Manufacturing enterprises make people's lives more convenient, medical enterprises help people live longer, and education enterprises enable people to become more capable. These values can be clearly identified. However, when the main output of a product is "more viewing duration", the value chain becomes questionable. Users pay non-renewable life time, get short-term dopamine in return, the platform gets ad inventory and pricing power, and content creators get revenue sharing. On this chain, the only party that suffers net consumption is the user themselves.

This is why no one is willing to wear the hat of "first in usage duration". It does not point to glory, but to responsibility. It means you have to answer a question that could be avoided before: whether those two hours make users better or worse?

3

A tacit understanding acquiesced by the industry: only pursue growth, no further questioning

It is worth noting that in this debate, the positions of both sides are actually very delicate.

Qin Shuo's attitude is restrained and accurate. While pointing out that ByteDance's ecosystem has occupied more than 40% of user duration, he actively emphasizes that "user duration does not equal user value", and specifically cites examples of Alipay, Meituan, JD.com and Pinduoduo - these apps are used for specific purposes and users leave immediately after use, with very short duration, but the value they create is not low. Behind this is a more fundamental judgment standard: duration is not the measure of value, but value is the measure of duration.

Li Liang's refutation is valid at the data level, but its direction is worth pondering. The data he cited is that "the growth rate of Tencent's short dramas and short videos far exceeds that of Douyin and Hongguo". In other words, his defense logic is not "we do not rely on duration", but "others are also competing for duration, and even competing faster". This logic itself precisely recognizes the legitimacy of duration competition, and only refuses to be singled out.

Thus, this debate presents a peculiar structure: no one denies that "occupying a large amount of users' time" is worth vigilance, but no one is willing to treat it as a question that needs to be answered head-on. Critics carefully restrain their focus to the data level, while the criticized party turns the issue into a dispute over statistical caliber and frames it as a widespread phenomenon across the industry.

This is a kind of collective tacit understanding in China's internet industry over the past few years: growth is the only KPI, and everyone avoids talking about the quality of growth.

This tacit understanding can be maintained because it is commercially viable. Under the advertising monetization model, user duration directly determines ad inventory and eCPM, and every extra minute of user stay brings extra revenue. The valuation models of the capital market also reward this capability: number of users, daily active users, duration, retention, every indicator can be converted into cash value. As a result, "keeping users stay a little longer" has evolved from a product goal to an organizational goal, then to an algorithm goal, and finally becomes an unquestioned default value in every line of code, every recommendation, and every incentive task.

However, commercial viability does not equal social viability. When the revenue of a business is directly proportional to users' time consumption, while the benefits users get from this consumption are difficult to measure, this business naturally has a moral gray area. No one in the industry is willing to pierce this layer of window paper, until someone really puts out the data and says "you have already occupied 40%", which triggers this storm.

4

The removal of coin reward functions shows that enterprises themselves know the answer

Beyond all the debates, there is a detail more convincing than any eloquence from either side.

In October 2026, Hongguo announced that it will fully shut down its coin reward function by the end of the year. In the past, users could get coins by watching dramas and checking in, which could be exchanged for cash. This mechanism was once criticized by the outside world for using small benefits to induce users, especially middle-aged and elderly users who are more sensitive to time cost. Taking the initiative to cut off the tool that can most effectively boost its usage duration is a courageous decision, and it also proves one thing: the platform itself clearly knows which mechanisms create value, and which ones only serve to extend user stay.

Coins are not content, and do not generate any value for viewing experience. Their only function is to keep users in front of the screen for a few more minutes, so as to get more ad exposures. The existence of this kind of mechanism is actually a very good test paper, which examines a company's true attitude towards "duration" - whether it regards duration as the natural result of value, or as an engineering target that can be artificially manipulated.

I am not here to give scores to any company. Hongguo's move to shut down the coin reward function is worthy of recognition; but if adjustments are only made when public opinion pressure is high enough, it means that the enterprise's self-correction mechanism is still passive. What is really convincing should be writing "whether users become better" into the first line of requirements for product design, rather than writing it in Chapter 4 of the annual social responsibility report.

5

Three questions worthy of response from all platforms

If we want to leave something valuable from this debate, I would like to condense it into three questions. These three questions are not targeted at ByteDance or Tencent, but at all enterprises that take users' time as their core operating resource.

First, is the duration a result of users' "choice" or of users being "trapped to stay"?

The difference between choice and being trapped to stay lies in the prior intention. When a user actively opens a book, a documentary or a course, his goal is clear, and the end point is also clear; when a user opens an information feed, his goal is vague, and the end point is determined by the algorithm. The former consumes content, while the latter consumes attention. This is not a distinction between good and bad content forms, but a dividing line of product ethics. A healthy platform should make users feel "I have had enough" when they leave, rather than "I want to watch one more".

Second, what tangible and carryable gains can users get after spending so much time?

Good content consumption should leave precipitation: a piece of knowledge, understanding of an emotion, a shared memory, or an aesthetic touch. However, a large amount of short video and short drama consumption is characterized by "emptiness after viewing" - the pleasure is realized at the moment, and leaves no trace after it ends. This does not mean that all content must be educational, and entertainment itself has its value. But when entertainment takes up more than two hours of users' daily time and hardly produces anything accumulative, this proportion is worth reflecting on. The value of time does not lie in being filled, but in bringing tangible gains.

Third, is the money the platform earns commensurate with the time users pay?

This is a distribution issue. Every hour a user spends on the platform is an hour of his life that can never be regenerated. How much of the advertising revenue the platform obtains flows back to content creators, how much is converted into better content supply, and how much is used to reduce excessive exploitation of users? This does not require enterprises to do charity, but requires a business that takes other people's time as raw material to have basic fairness of consideration.

6

Conclusion

Back to the debate itself, who is the "King of Time" actually does not matter. Tencent's time is time for social relations, ByteDance's time is time for content, and Meituan's time is time for services. They are not measured by the same ruler. Using a unified percentage to label the entire Chinese internet is destined to be inaccurate.

But the reason why this debate is worth remembering is that it unexpectedly reaches a consensus: duration can prove capability, but it cannot prove value.

The success of China's internet over the past two decades is largely a success of "occupying users' time". From portals to search engines, from social networking to e-commerce, from short videos to short dramas, every iteration is a redistribution of users' attention. This model has supported the world's second largest internet industry, and has also cultivated world-class product capabilities and organizational capabilities. But today, user scale has hit the ceiling, and the average daily usage duration per capita has approached the 6.3-hour mobile internet monitoring threshold, and the incremental time that can be competed for is running out. The next step of the industry can no longer rely on "snatching more time", but on "making the existing time more valuable".

This means that the evaluation system must change. Enterprises need to start paying attention to indicators beyond completion rate: users' feelings after leaving, the retention value of content, the revenue structure of creators, and the negative externalities of the platform. The capital market also needs to assign different valuations to "high-quality duration" and "low-quality duration", instead of treating all user stay equally as traffic.

If an enterprise fails to make users better but instead makes them worse, no matter how high its market value is or how fast it grows, it is socially questionable. This sentence sounds like moral preaching, but it is actually the most fundamental business logic: users' time is limited, users' patience is limited, and users' tolerance for being consumed is also limited. All growth at the cost of consumption will eventually have to be paid back at some point.

Therefore, instead of debating whether this is the ByteDance era or the Tencent era, it is better to confirm one thing first: whether this is valuable time.

Time will eventually prove that the one that can last is never the one that occupies users for the longest time, but the one that makes users better.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Lishilunping Business Review" (ID: libusiness), written by Wang Chuan, and published with authorization from 36Kr.