Kuaishou Heightens Strategy to Reach 300 Million DAU by Chinese New Year

With the Chinese Spring Festival drawing near, Kuaishou’s goal of reaching 300 million daily active users (DAU) before the Chinese New Year has been further heightened according to 36Kr. Kuaishou entered a battle called “K3” in June, after the founder Su Hua and Chen Yixiao expressed their dissatisfaction with the company’s situation in an internal letter. This is the first time Kuaishou accounted for the K3 battle after it started.

After 4 months, the objective of K3 battle has been slightly adjusted, while the strategies have been made clear. The original goal of “300 million DAU” has been broken into two phases. The new periodical goal is to reach 300 million peak DAU before the Spring Festival, and average DAU in three months after the Spring Festival.

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As for strategies, Kuaishou underscored the importance of Spring Festival red packets and its app Kuaishou Speedup, which is a faster and smaller version of Kuaishou that targets rural or mid-scholar level audiences.

The Speedup version of the short video app has reached 10 million DAU 20 days after its launch in August, 2019, and has become one of the major forces helping Kuaishou reach the K3 objective. Kuaishou Speedup allowed users to get cash-back by viewing videos, a model similar to popular Chinese news app Qutoutiao.

Sources say that Kuaishou’s DAU now are ranging from 200-210 million, still far from the the 300 million goal of the K3 battle. However, with the Spring Festival approaching, Kuaishou is expecting a rapid growth in its user base, and is optimistic about the outcome.

Kuaishou has replaced Baidu to become the exclusive sponsor of CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala, one of the most watched television shows of the year. With a budget of 4 billion yuan, nearly half will go into the Spring Festival red packets. A tradition of spreading good fortune, digital red packets have become increasingly popular among tech companies and e-commerce platforms that use them to boost their user base. The practice was introduced by Tencent’s WeChat in 2016.