As a community platform with “life” as the core content, Xiaohongshu has always been known for its unique grass planting model and user stickiness. However, with the opening of the external link function and in-depth cooperation with e-commerce platforms such as Taotian and JD.com, Xiaohongshu seems to be accelerating its commercialization transformation. Is this change an inevitable choice for the development of the platform, or is it possible to cause a hidden danger of “taste” in the user experience?
This year’s 618 is really a lot to watch, on the one hand, the red, yellow and blue instant retail plus 618 war, on the other hand, Xiaohongshu launched the “Red Cat Plan”, opening the city gate to access Taotian external links.
Previously, Xiaohongshu was proud that “no matter which platform the order is placed, when the user makes a decision, it is in Xiaohongshu.” ”
But obviously Xiaohongshu is no longer satisfied with the mode of in-site decision to search off-site, and directly completes the transformation to an e-commerce platform in one step.
On May 29, the “Hongjing Plan” was also officially logged in, and JD.com also officially announced the advertising plan launched by the strategic cooperation with Xiaohongshu.
In the past few days, there has also been news that the jump cooperation between Xiaohongshu and Pinduoduo has also entered the agenda, and “Red Duoduo” is about to be put in place.
As a Xiaohongshu user for many years, I also want to talk a few words.
1. Xiaohongshu opens external links, and the first to cheer must be the merchants.
Although the previous grass planting observation plans such as “Little Red Star” and “Little Red Alliance” can facilitate merchants to observe the business link from advertising to transaction conversion. But after all, it is planting grass on the site, and the search pattern outside the site is not so clear, and there is no way to intuitively see the real conversion data.
The first role of this “grass planting direct” is dataization, so that merchants can intuitively see the investment conversion ratio, so that they can invest in advertising with more confidence, and can also greatly reduce the situation of explosive articles and not explosive orders.
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Of course, doing this is also Xiaohongshu’s confidence in its platform advertising conversion ability.
At the Xiaohongshu 2025 WILL Business Conference, Huangchao gave a data that 70% of paying users reached and converted for Xiaohongshu, and 90% of paying users were Xiaohongshu users.
At that time, I was shocked to see this data, and I even suspected that these two companies might not have anything to do with each other.
It is indeed reasonable to review afterwards, a product for overseas Chinese tourism, the main focus is to enjoy life, and “life” is precisely the core position of Xiaohongshu, which is naturally a match made in heaven.
2. Use a keyword to describe Xiaohongshu, which must be “life”.
They themselves think so, from “marking my life”, “finding the life you want”, to today’s “life guide for 300 million people”, the slogan is changing, but the keywords of life have not changed.
Even the e-commerce business is defined by COO Conan as “lifestyle e-commerce”.
The content of Xiaohongshu focuses more on not this “person”, but the “life” shared by this person. The outfits, travel, and food they share focus on these scenes, and what resonates is always the “life” shared by this person.
Looking at beautiful women and handsome guys, I might as well go to Douyin and Bilibili to see if they can move.
This is the core competitiveness of Xiaohongshu that can still rely on graphics and text to occupy a place under the dimensionality reduction of short video content such as Douying, Kuai, and B.
But life is not easy to mix.
In the era of planting grass inside the site and searching outside the site, the implantation is relatively vague, the conversion rate is not so high, and the user opinions are not so large.
At the previous internal sharing meeting for the 10th anniversary of Xiaohongshu, Mao Wenchao used the words “vast” and “warm” to set the tone for the Xiaohongshu community.
It is true that life requires a broad vision and a warm environment, but when sharing life is mixed with too much utilitarianism, will Xiaohongshu become the next micro-business gathering place?
In my circle of friends, there are a few relatives and friends who are blocked, although they are still enthusiastic when they meet, but their regular milk powder and insurance swiping are still quite annoying, in order to keep my circle of friends just a circle of friends, I still have to block it.
If one day the “life” of others searched by Xiaohongshu frequently becomes the “soft and wide” of others, I may also want to find a blocking function.
3. However, there are many “soft and wide” of others, and KOLs/KOCs who want to make money on the platform are welcome.
Compared with other platforms, it is easier to start from scratch on Xiaohongshu. After all, the focus is on life rather than people, to put it bluntly, it is not so easy to produce “big Internet celebrities”.
As of June 2024, the proportion of fans on Douyin and Xiaohongshu in the range of 1 million to 10 million is 0.16%, 0.43%, and 0.02% respectively.
Xiaohongshu is also a bit “right for things and not right people”, that is, literary celebrities are not popular.
According to the “2024 Xiaohongshu rise100 e-commerce annual list” released by Xiaohongshu e-commerce, it can be seen that those amateurs without a fan base are the mainstream of the top 100 buyers.
This is consistent with the previous data trend that 68.06% of Xiaohongshu’s “grass planters” in the first quarter of 2024 are amateurs with less than 5,000 fans.
This data means that Xiaohongshu is not as obvious as Douyin, Kuaishou, and Weibo, and the Matthew effect is not as obvious, and Xiaohongshu is a very good choice for KOLs/KOCs who want to make money from the platform.
Opening external links can further enhance the profitability of Xiaohongshu KOLs/KOCs. Naturally, it can also attract more fresh blood, which is beneficial to the platform’s users to attract new people.
But whether it can retain old users has to be a question mark. After all, Xiaohongshu users are accustomed to the search mode, and the content they search for is too many advertisements, so it is difficult to describe.
4. The core model of Xiaohongshu marketing is KFS, that is, KOL/KOC experts, Feeds information flow and Search search.
Search is the keyword of Xiaohongshu.
Different from the “brushing” of Shake, Kuai, B, and Micro, Xiaohongshu users have to rely on “search” to get an excellent experience.
Tell me a little about my personal experience.
The first time I used Xiaohongshu was to see what flowers were more suitable to bring on the first side of the blind date, and I didn’t have so many ideas at that time, that is, I had the impression that Xiaohongshu had many female users, which was more professional in this regard.
But after I logged in for the first time and searched for relevant information, for a long time when I opened Xiaohongshu and saw the content, 7 or 80% of it was flowers and blind date posts. It wasn’t until later that I developed the habit of searching that the recommended content became richer.
At worst, this is called a serious information cocoon, and at best, it is the platform encouraging users to take the initiative to “break the wall”.
According to information given by Wall Street News last year, Xiaohongshu’s average daily search volume in the fourth quarter of 2024 reached 600 million. According to the “Xiaohongshu 2024 Annual Operating Data Report”, as of mid-2024, DAU reached 120 million.
Search is the normal use of Xiaohongshu users.
One of the reasons why Baidu has been in a difficult situation in the public opinion field for so many years is that it is difficult to balance the contradiction between commercialization and search engine functions.
5. When it comes to accelerating commercialization, I really want to talk about another content platform – Zhihu.
Kai-Fu Lee once evaluated Zhou Yuan as “too literati”, and Zhou Yuan also expressed his original intention of founding Zhihu: to make Zhihu a tool for generating, sharing and disseminating knowledge.
At that time, Zhihu was still a model that strictly prohibited the inclusion of soft texts and private goods in the answer, and adhered to the “literati style”. In March 2018, Zhihu big V Zhang Jiawei was banned for 7 days for receiving private advertisements on Zhihu.
But today, Zhihu has become the one who urges you to monetize, with a little bit of a fan base, and accounts such as “Skills Research Institute”, “Creator Assistant”, “Knowledge Paid Assistant” in private messages have pushed monetization strategies, and even sent text messages asking you if you want to monetize your tweets.
In the pursuit of monetization, Zhihu Salt Selection has become an indispensable part of profitability, and it has also become an “indispensable” part of serious answers.
Persistent monetization affects content quality and platform environment, which is very common and embarrassing.
Xiaohongshu doesn’t seem to want to follow the old path of Zhihu.
As early as 2020, Xiaohongshu opened an external link, but in just one year, it was closed due to poor user experience and turned to doing it itself.
In the past few years, Xiaohongshu has made a lot of efforts in e-commerce, launching the “number store integration” in 2021 to lower the threshold for opening a store, and in 2023, it will focus on buyers and live broadcast e-commerce, and Xiaohongshu COO Conan has also said before that Xiaohongshu “the era of buyers has come”.
But live streaming and tweet software are two different things, the buyer’s live broadcast room is generously promoted, and the soft and wide tweet is implanted, for ordinary users, it is always two different experiences.
This opening of external links, it is basically foreseeable that the rise in advertising performance can be foreseen, and the e-commerce business still has to be affected to some extent, and the already low proportion of e-commerce revenue may further widen the gap with the advertising business.
6. Many people also think that Xiaohongshu’s opening of external links is giving up self-operated e-commerce?
That’s not necessarily.
According to the data of the Tianyancha APP, in February this year, Xiaohongshu acquired Shu Neng Perfect, which is a live broadcast e-commerce company.
Look, Xiaohongshu still wants to do e-commerce by itself.
Rather than saying that Xiaohongshu has given up self-operated e-commerce, it is better to say that this is a temporary compromise made by Xiaohongshu to accelerate commercialization after the development of self-operated e-commerce has been blocked.
According to Tianyancha APP data, as of July 2024, Xiaohongshu’s Series E financing valuation is 17 billion yuan. It is not surprising that the news of the listing comes out one day.
Doing e-commerce on your own is really complicated.
The promotion of Bilibili membership is not small, but the core revenue is still in advertising, games, and value-added services.
It can only be said that the infrastructure built by e-commerce platforms in the past made many people feel that “I can do it if I go to it”.
Taotian, JD.com, Pinduoduo, these top e-commerce companies are also a trading system that has been boiled over many years of accumulation, and the content platforms understand the traffic very well, but the follow-up supply chain, warehousing and logistics, after-sales operations, etc., which link is not a hard bone?
Vipshop was not in full swing at the beginning, and now its market value hovers around $7.5 billion, evaporating more than $15 billion from its all-time high. It is still so difficult for a professional e-commerce platform, and the difficulty of a content platform to do e-commerce can be imagined.
But at this stage, you can’t help but consider accelerating commercialization.
Now is the stage when e-commerce traffic is gradually peaking, and the traffic delivered by content platforms to e-commerce platforms is naturally high-frequency and low-frequency.
Which platform doesn’t want to get a handful of Xiaohongshu fresh traffic, the short-term initiative is still in the hands of Xiaohongshu, if you want to use Xiaohongshu as a traffic springboard, you have to pay for tickets first, right?
Station B has also opened links to jump to other e-commerce platforms before, but recently many users of Station B have also discovered that the link jumps not to Taobao but to buy members?
The current initiative is still in Xiaohongshu, and it is still within control, what about the future? Whether one day I will also receive Xiaohongshu’s “monetization gift package”, it’s hard to say.
Disclaimer: This article is based on the company’s statutory disclosure and published information, but the author does not guarantee the completeness and timeliness of the information.
In addition: the stock market is risky, and you need to be cautious when entering the market. The article does not constitute investment advice, and investment must be judged by oneself.
