Alipay hired a significant number of staff with expertise in advertising last year as it seeks a shift away from being a pure payment tool, according to a report by China Entrepreneur. Despite having over 700 million monthly active users, the payment app lacks the features to entice its huge user base to stay on the platform beyond making transactions.

Why it matters: Developing a sustainable content ecology based on short videos, livestreaming, and social engagement would pave the way to new revenue streams for Alipay.

Details: Alipay is reportedly beta testing a social feature called “Community of Interest”, where users with shared interests, ranging from camping, coffee, and hiking to fishing, can join groups to discuss or organize offline activities.

• This year marks the ninth anniversary of Alipay’s “Collect Wufu” (five kinds of fortune cards) campaign, a “digital temple fair” where users attempt to collect all five different fortune cards to share in a total of RMB 500 million worth of cash bonuses. Typically, participants receive anywhere from RMB 2 to RMB 3 each. 
• The platform boosted cash incentives during the recent nationwide Spring Festival holiday, adding an extra RMB 300 million to reward users for watching short videos and livestreams within Alipay while also pouring more than RMB 25 million into rewards for high-quality content creators, the company said in a statement.
• Neither Alipay nor third-party database platforms announced the app’s per usage hours during the eight-day Chinese New Year holiday period. However, according to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), Alipay didn’t make the list of the top five most-used apps during the break, which comprised Douyin, WeChat, Kuaishou, Tencent Video, and news aggregator Jinri Toutiao.
• According to a report by QuestMobile, Alipay’s average daily usage per person only hit 7.8 minutes during the seven-day Spring Festival holiday in 2023.
• Taobao and Alipay are no longer as tightly bound as they once were, another reason Alipay needs to shift quickly to accelerate traffic monetization. It was reported recently that Alibaba’s e-commerce marketplace is gradually introducing an option to pay using rival platform WeChat, something it has long resisted.

Context: WeChat and Alipay were level in 2021 in terms of usage by mobile payment customers, but in 2022, WeChat took a 2.6% larger share of the market after expanding its range of payment scenarios, the latest figure from China’s payment & clearing industry association showed.