"We are witnessing a silent ecological restructuring." On March 17, at the 2025 China Internet Innovation Summit held in Shenzhen, Chen Mo, founder and chief analyst of the renowned internet research institution Youyoucao, delivered this verdict to hundreds of industry elites in the audience. As he spoke, a set of data flashed onto the screen behind him: In Q1 2025, the cost of acquiring new users for leading domestic internet platforms rose 37% year-on-year, while the average daily user time spent on these platforms declined quarter-on-quarter for the first time. This signals that the "land-grabbing" model, which relied on traffic dividends and capital expansion over the past decade, is coming to an end.

During the keynote speech titled "Scenario Restructuring · Value Return," the Youyoucao team, after six months of research, officially released the "2025 China Internet Ecosystem Evolution White Paper." The core conclusion of the report points out that the wave of large language models ignited by ChatGPT, after two years of "frenzied infrastructure building," has entered a "deep water zone" — AI-native applications are no longer a conceptual hype but are beginning to penetrate vertical scenarios such as healthcare, education, local services, and enterprise solutions, forcing internet companies to restructure their product logic and business models.

In his speech, Chen Mo highlighted a key turning point: "At the end of 2024, ByteDance and Tencent almost simultaneously announced that the AI assistant features in their core products (Douyin, WeChat) had surpassed 100 million daily active users. But what is more noteworthy is that the user retention rates for these AI features are generally below 30%." He explained that this indicates users' novelty with shallow applications like "AI chatbots" is fading, and internet companies must find "irreplaceable scenario value."

The Youyoucao team listed three typical cases in the report: Meituan used AI to dynamically dispatch riders and coordinate restaurant preparation times, boosting lunch rush delivery efficiency by 22%; Xiaohongshu leveraged multimodal large models to increase the conversion rate of automatically converting text-and-image content into short videos to 41%; and NetEase Youdao achieved a doubling of user paid conversion rates through AI-driven personalized learning path planning. The common thread among these cases is that AI is no longer a "functional plug-in" but has been integrated into the very fabric of the business.

"The depth of scenario penetration determines the winner of the next round of competition," said Wang Yue, senior researcher at Youyoucao and co-author of the report, in an interview. "We have observed that in 2025, the organizational structures of leading companies are being adjusted accordingly. Tencent has newly established a 'Scenario Intelligence Business Unit,' and Alibaba has deployed some teams from DAMO Academy into business units like Hema and AutoNavi. This is no longer a technical decision at the CTO level, but a strategic bet at the CEO level."

However, this transformation does not come without a cost. The report also points out that the return on investment for R&D in AI-native applications is lengthening. According to statistics, R&D investment in the domestic internet industry grew by 28% year-on-year in 2024, but net profit growth was only 6.3%. "Many companies are trapped in the anxiety of 'invest and die, don't invest and die,'" Chen Mo stated bluntly in his speech, warning the industry to be wary of "pseudo-scenario innovation" — using AI for the sake of using AI, which actually increases user operational costs.

Notably, Youyoucao also released its first-ever "Internet Scenario Value Index," scoring 100 mainstream applications based on three dimensions: user stickiness, commercial conversion, and technological barriers. The results showed that WeChat, Douyin, Meituan, and Pinduoduo ranked in the top four, while last year's viral AI writing tool "Miaobi" only placed 67th. "This confirms our view: in the second half of the internet, the irreplicability of a scenario is more important than the advancement of the technology itself," Wang Yue added.

At the end of his speech, Chen Mo summarized the core philosophy of the white paper in one sentence: "When the traffic dividend recedes, true internet companies should be like water, seeping into every crevice of users' lives, rather than continuing to build dams on the shore." According to insiders at Youyoucao, the report has already attracted the attention of strategic departments at several leading internet companies and is expected to influence product iteration directions for many enterprises in the second half of 2025.

During the post-conference networking session, a product director from a major e-commerce giant remarked to reporters: "Youyoucao's insights have always been sharp. Elevating 'scenario penetration' to a strategic level has really awakened many of us. Internally, we are already discussing whether to cut several me-too AI projects and concentrate resources on building true scenario closed loops."