It is a tradition of the Chinese people to watch CCTV's Spring Festival Gala to kill time while waiting for the arrival of the Lunar New Year. And hongbao grabbing has been widely perceived by people like Wang Yu as a good distrac-tion during the boring parts of the nearly-five-hour-long Gala.
Wang told the Global Times on Tues-day that she never missed the hongbao promotion during the live broadcast of CCTV's Spring Festival Gala, even though she seldom participates in such events at other times.
"I have time, and each hongbao is usually filled with real cash," said Wang, who grabbed nearly 20 yuan via WeChat during last year's Gala.
On Monday, Alipay disclosed that it would send out digital hongbao worth hundreds of millions of yuan in cash during CCTV's Spring Festival TV Gala.
Wooing users
Alipay said it will give away a big red envelope with more than 200 million yuan during the live broadcast of the Gala. But people have to qualify for the giveaway by doing things like friending about 20 people on Alipay.
The move suggests that Alipay is trying hard to attract more users and promote its social networking (SNS) function, analysts said.
"The integration of SNS function with payment feature is crucial, which not only enhances users' loyalty to Ali-pay, but also plays a key role in the de-velopment of Alibaba's online-to-offline business," Liu Dingding, an industry analyst with Beijing-based consulting firm Sootoo, told the Global Times on Monday.
Liu said Alipay's aggressive efforts in this year's hongbao battle will cause some headwinds for the development of WeChat's payment service.
"But the number of hongbao sent via WeChat will continue growing during this year's Chinese Lunar New Year holidays," Hao said, noting that people have already gotten used to sending digital hongbao to relatives and friends via WeChat.
A total of 1.01 billion hongbao were sent via WeChat on chuxi in 2015, way up from 16 million in 2014, according to Tencent.
To further encourage users to transfer money via WeChat, the app on Tuesday temporarily tried out a new fea-tures that allowed users to post blurred photographs, which can only be seen clearly by friends who gave cash-filled digital hongbao to the poster.
What's next?
Chinese Lunar New Year hongbao grabbing activities has been proved to be an effective way for online payment services to build up their user bases.
Thanks to the red envelope activi-ties, Tencent said in its latest quarterly financial report that more than 200 million users had linked bank accounts to their WeChat and QQ accounts as of September 2015.
As for Alipay, its SNS function will grow in popularity due to the payment tool's efforts in this year's hongbao battle, Liu said.
It seems that Alipay has at least convinced people like Wang to link their friends together via Alipay.
"I plan to send friend requests to my good friends on Alipay to get the chance to grab its big hongbao on chuxi," Wang said.
However, just because people link their bank accounts to WeChat doesn't mean they will end up using WeChat's mobile payment tool. And just because people add friends to their Alipay ac-count doesn't mean they will use its chat function. Wang has no plans to chat with her friends on Alipay.
Beijing resident Zhang Xi also thinks that WeChat won't be able to beat Alipay at its own game, and vice versa.
"It's better for Alipay to just exist as a specialized payment tool," Zhang told the Global Times on Tuesday.
