Doubao's paid subscription led to a 6 million drop in monthly active users, highlighting the conflict between AI commercialization and free-user habits, putting ByteDance's growth under pressure.
When ByteDance decided to launch Doubao's premium annual subscription tier, priced at several thousand yuan, the internet giant had effectively acknowledged a harsh commercial reality: the old playbook of relying purely on traffic scale to prop up model capabilities could no longer mask the suffocating financial losses piling up on its backend.
Recently, Doubao's professional paid tier sparked heated discussion across the internet, while also revealing a monthly active user figure that has left executives deeply unsettled—within one month of introducing the paid option, this AI assistant, which once boasted hundreds of millions of users, experienced a rare month-over-month decline in MAU, shedding roughly six million active users. For a product that has long depended on free subsidies to aggressively capture traffic from lower-tier markets, losing six million users is tantamount to cracking open a gaping hole in what was once a rock-solid growth engine.
The deeper profit-driven reasons behind this user backlash go far beyond mere "price sensitivity." If you trace through the dense web of trademark registration filings in Qichacha's database, you'll find that ByteDance's commercialization strategy betrays a nearly anxious defensive posture. Behind Beijing Chuntian Zhiyun Technology Co., Ltd., there sits a stack of strikingly literal homophone trademarks—"Doubao," "Doubao," "Doubao" (variants like 逗包, 逗宝, 豆抱)—essentially ByteDance's way of ensuring that no competitor gets even an inch of room in the future battle for brand mindshare. But these preventive legal shields clearly cannot resolve the core contradiction at hand: in China's AI ecosystem, where the habit of free usage is deeply entrenched, the mass market simply refuses to pay for these seemingly high-minded productivity tools.
ByteDance's hand was actually revealed earlier than anyone else's. According to disclosures from multiple sources, the company's net profit in 2025 is projected to plummet by over 70%, with the primary culprit being the massive capital expenditures in Q3 and Q4 on full-chain AI infrastructure and GPU computing power. As the domestic AI assistant with the highest MAU, Doubao effectively bears the burden of "firefighting" for the entire group's AI business. But forcing a "money-burning machine" to transform into a "monetization platform" is, from a business logic standpoint, a high-stakes gamble in itself.
Especially when this "commercialization" isn't limited to subscription fees, but also attempts to hard-wire e-commerce referral cards directly into AI responses, the dilution of user experience becomes inevitable. When a user asks a knowledge-based question and receives an answer laced with commercial purchase links, the "intelligent assistant" purity that Doubao once took pride in evaporates entirely.
The reckoning of the commercial world has never been kind to those who overstep boundaries. In this ruthless arena, where life and death are defined by genuine repurchase rates and GPU depreciation costs, old-school traffic players who rely on manual backend stitching of model performance and lack truly killer application scenarios will inevitably face the most unforgiving growing pains. The loss of six million users is a sobering bill handed to ByteDance: in the ledger of AI, there is no such thing as having it both ways. Whoever tries to cash in on users' trust in free services before their model capabilities have crossed the threshold of absolute monopoly must bear the cost of being crushed by the market. This isn't just Doubao's predicament—it's the first bitter pill that all domestic large models must swallow as they push deeper into the commercial endgame.