Meitu Launched AI Gift Money during Spring Festival and is Spreading Overseas Rapidly

During the Spring Festival, Meitu, an image processing app, launched an activity called “win money with face score”. Chinese Internet giants used AI (artificial intelligence), AR (augmented reality) and other technologies to develop diverse ways of gifting money. By clicking “black technology” (futuristic technology) in the Meitu app, you can take a selfie and turn it into a portrait using the painting robot function. AI calculates the user’s facial attractiveness according to the portrait and the user can get money according to the rating.

photo resource:VCG

The Digital Journal, a website that focuses on the humanities, science and technology, said “Meitu’s AI technology stirred up a Spring Festival fervor” on March 2.

A beautifying camera app made by Meitu called Beautycam features a number of Spring Festival scenarios based on customs, such as the New Year’s Eve dinner, the family blessing, and red packets. Beautycam guides users to record every reunion with the family. Meipai, a short video app, leads users to win lucky money through dancing.

“win money with face score”activity

According to the 2018 Chinese Mobile Phone App Index T1000 report released by iiMedia Research, people used life service apps such as WeChat and Didi as well as photo beautifying apps during the Spring Festival. Meituxiuxiu ranked top among its peers with more than 26 percent of daily active rate.

In the report, Meitu both rank first among its peers in both daily active rate and penetration rate, reaching 26.1 percent and 10.02 percent, respectively.

Meitu apps constantly introduce new features and use the most popular marketing strategies. Meitu apps have been downloaded by more than 1.5 billion devices and are used by more than 500 million global users. Beautyplus has more than 300 million global users. Meitu apps and Meitu culture have become an example of Chinese cultural output.

Meitu says that internationalization is an important strategy after the company goes public. In addition to Beautyplus, Meitu actively expands overseas markets through Meituxiuxiu and other beauty cameras. Meitu 2017 interim report reveals that Meitu has 93.743 million active overseas users, accounting for 19.4 percent of its 481.3 million global monthly active users.

This article originally appeared in Cankaoxiaoxi and was translated by Pandaily.