Wen/Muyu
Xiaohongshu wants to build an online city-state.
The reason why we say "polis" instead of "city" is because the word sounds more humanistic and ideal. Recently, Xiaohongshu officially launched the Community Business Convention. On the basis of the community values of "sincere sharing and friendly interaction" in the Community Convention last year, it added the business values of "sincere management and intentional creation", which set the tone for the direction of community operation.
Little Red Book officials are trying to convey an idea that they are creating an online city-state, and the users are all residents. They are sharing their real life online.
When anything develops to a certain scale, it will inevitably form some kind of public cognition, and Little Red Book, as the source of new consumption and online celebrity brand,Its "planting grass" attribute is deeply rooted in people’s hearts, which naturally makes people think of the scourge of "consumerism".
In Xiaohongshu COO Conan’s view, the public has a "cognitive angle" to Xiaohongshu.
Xiaohongshu COO Conan
The question that Little Red Book needs to answer is: Does it convey a "better life" or promote a "beautified life"? But this is not how the management expresses it, but will eventually land in the governance of the community.
From the official attitude, we attach great importance to this "convention".
As early as when the Community Convention was just launched, COO Conan of Xiaohongshu explained that it was called the Convention instead of the value norm because the value norm was more like a one-way request from the top down to the community residents from the perspective of community operators, while the Convention was a contract that Xiaohongshu repeatedly discussed and revised with different types of residents and finally formed.
When the content community is generally attacked by the community atmosphere and commercial realization, Xiaohongshu’s move is to return the focus to community governance.Is this "duty-keeping" a way to avoid conservatism or stick to one’s original heart? What impact will it have on its business fundamentals?
Left or right
Xiaohongshu chose to reinforce the city wall to counter the panic of commercial realization.
It seems that people in the content community are generally not good at making money. From Kelly Y Zhou in Zhihu, Rui Chen in bilibili, and Qu Fang in Xiaohongshu, they all talk about content operation, but they are all difficult in realizing business.In them, what you see is more the extension of some idealism, but less the decisive ferocity of some wars.
"In the early days of our business, we focused on content, never thought about the development path, and we were even more confused about how to realize it." Qu Fang’s words may represent the plight of all content communities.
The birth of these major content communities seems to have a sense of mission, but under the cruel survival test of business, these sense of mission now seems to be at a loss.
Data source: burning knowledge consulting, finishing by China Commercial Industry Research Institute.
Zhihu and bilibili, which have been listed, are under greater financial pressure. Take Zhihu as an example. In addition to the most traditional advertisements, members are sold, e-commerce, live broadcast and knowledge promotion are paid, but they are still struggling.
Compared with the first two,Xiaohongshu seems to be more "Buddhist" and "flat". He also does e-commerce and videos, but he feels that he has not exhausted his efforts. His local life is also in a state of "stocking" and he still earns money from advertising honestly.
However, it is obviously more and more difficult to earn money from advertising, and the traffic peaks, and the tigers are waiting around.
QuestMobile predicts that the growth rate of Internet advertising market in China will continue to decline in the next two years, and the content community platform is no exception. According to the report, the growth rate of social advertising market in 2022 and 2023 is expected to be 16.4% and 12.1%, which is significantly lower than the peak of 28.3% in 2020.
What is even more troublesome is that the business of "planting grass" itself has also been targeted by more and more people.
After Sina failed to push the oasis to stop Xiaohongshu in 2019, it quietly launched Hobby in March this year, positioning itself as a trend party for young people to create a community; Netease recently launched "Bi Ying", which is positioned as an emotional video interactive community for young people. In terms of product form and operation mode, both of them pay attention to and encourage life sharing, which is more like the video version of "Little Red Book" for the Z era.
Weibo screenshot
Not to mention Taobao and Tik Tok.
At the end of 2020, Taobao went online and became the first-level entrance of the homepage. It belongs to the grass content aggregation platform that positively marked Xiaohongshu. In less than one year, it achieved over 250 million monthly activities and over 50 million daily activities, contributing one-third of Taobao’s orders. Last year’s Double Eleven, Taobao visited more than 250 million users browsing grass content.
In Tik Tok, a team codenamed "L" was set up in the middle of last year to study Little Red Books, and the graphic function was launched in the App. There are rumors that a life-like community product is planned.
For Xiaohongshu, the diversified realization of uniform structure is still far away, advertising still supports the main revenue, and the businesses of the giants are crossing each other without borders. At this juncture, it is obviously more important to hold the basic disk of the community than commercial expansion.
What is "copy not to go"?
Little Red Book is an encyclopedia of life in the cloak of community.
In the Internet field, products are easy to copy, even at the pixel level, but at the same time, products are difficult to copy, and even the founding team can’t make a new one.
The moat of Little Red Book is actually higher than many people think, which is also its core value.
Peeling off the seemingly exquisite consumerism coat of Little Red Book, its skeleton is actually very pragmatic.
This pragmatism is not the efficiency orientation of the business model. In fact, Xiaohongshu’s start-up team has no entrepreneurial experience or Internet experience. The earliest product of Little Red Book is a PDF of Hong Kong shopping guide, which was made by Conan. In fact, it is a very simple strategy sharing, and strategy is a collection of methodology. Later, less than a month after the PDF document was launched, it was downloaded 500,000 times.
Source: Network
The later content trend of Little Red Book also continued this route, that is, sharing practical life notes.
Before 2016, Xiaohongshu’s recommendation mode was featured by editing and centralized operation, which would affect the product efficiency, but it formed an overflow of social and cultural content value, which is actually the function of the media, with the content surplus of local culture to popular culture, realizing the spread of influence and the growth of users.
Under the greatest common denominator of "life", the content boundary of Xiaohongshu has been continuously broadened, from beauty and clothing to home improvement, emotion, workplace and self-growth, but it is always inseparable from the word "useful".
This is the root of the strong search attribute of Little Red Book as a content community.
It has precipitated a lot of practical life experiences, and the long tail effect of the content is obvious, and many notes are constantly being dug by latecomers. A strange phenomenon is that the notes of Xiaohongshu are often collected more than praised.
The strong functionality of the little red book actually makes it play the role of an online dictionary of life experience in a sense, which means that the longer the little red book is operated, the higher the value of the precipitated content and the higher the moat.
The maximization of this "usefulness" lies in encouraging users to produce UGC content.In turn, it promoted Xiaohongshu to build a set of traffic "equal rights" mechanism.
This is actually closely related to the attributes of the content.
Life experience is universal rather than authoritative, and it doesn’t need any vertical professional endorsement. For example, Weibo and Zhihu started their business by introducing public knowledge, while the latter invited Internet tycoons and elites to endorse the platform through social status and identity authority, and output high-value content to achieve the diffusion effect from the center to the periphery, attracting more users with an attitude of onlookers and learning.
Screenshot of Xiaohongshu
These big V’s are performers in the center of the stage, and users are fans who applaud, which constitutes the power structure of the platform. Once this power structure is broken, for example, Weibo is publicly criticized and Zhihu V is skinned, the authority of community content will be completely deconstructed and become a noisy and disorderly public opinion field.
The content, form and operation mechanism of Little Red Book avoid this kind of conflict, and the subjectivity of life experience makes it not have top-down power and class overlooking color.
Unless "showing off wealth", this is also the main source of the public relations crisis and negative public opinion of Xiaohongshu. Therefore, in the Community Convention, Xiaohongshu explicitly opposes showing off wealth. In the conversation between Conan and Liu Qing, she also mentioned that Xiaohongshu will blur this class and sense of gap through operation.
Life experience can be contributed by everyone, so in order to let users contribute more UGC, Xiaohongshu did not intend to guide KOL, which also formed a situation that Xiaohongshu was all over the small KOC and lacked the top KOL. Here, the content distribution of "Little Transparency" and "Big Brother" is equal in traffic, and ordinary users without fans may also produce an "explosive article".
This is also related to the content form of pictures and texts. For example, in bilibili, the aesthetic threshold of video content produced by amateurs will be very low, which will affect the content presentation quality of the whole community. Therefore, bilibili will intentionally guide the professional UP, while the production threshold of pictures and texts with little red books less than 1,000 words is much lower for ordinary people.
Bilibili and Xiaohongshu, as the two most sticky communities in the content community, are inseparable from their respect for users themselves, rather than just treating them as digital traffic.
In an exclusive interview with LatePost, Rui Chen bluntly said: "Users in China are the cutest, because too few enterprises in China regard users as equal people. As long as you treat him as an equal, he is very protective of you. "
The complexity of the multilateral relationship in the content community naturally makes it difficult to operate, which is different from the clear bilateral relationship of buying and selling in the e-commerce platform, and the nodes with balanced interests are easier to control.
Therefore, the content community will inevitably go into strong operation and realize intervention through value orientation.With the growth of users, how to find a clear and definite value of the greatest common denominator is also a challenge for every content community.Bilibili broke the circle from the secondary group and Zhihu sank from the Internet elite, both of which were and are still facing the situation of split community atmosphere.
Data source: burning knowledge consulting, finishing by China Commercial Industry Research Institute.
It was not until 2021 that Xiaohongshu explored the Community Convention, condensed the community values of "sincere sharing and friendly interaction", and extended it to the business values of "sincere management and intentional creation" in the recent Community Business Convention, and guided it through detailed provisions.
Zhang Xiaolong mentioned in the product view behind WeChat that people are the reactor of the environment, so it is necessary to create an "environment", and then this "environment" will determine what kind of reaction users will make, and users will be drawn by the "environment" you create.
This actually means that the content community can’t really be "decentralized". Conan also said when talking with Liu Qing that Xiaohongshu can’t accept all phenomena just because it is a platform. After 2016, Xiaohongshu introduced algorithm recommendation and implemented "decentralization" in traffic distribution. However, it is still exploring "central idea" in operation and value guidance, which is the hidden line of Xiaohongshu and intentionally shapes the community atmosphere through traffic mechanism.
The biggest moat of Xiaohongshu lies in the "organic environment" that it combines systematic evolution with its own value orientation.
How does the "polis" do business?
Not making money is immoral in business.
Xiaohongshu proposed to build an online city, of course, not only based on a community experiment, although the community does have a lot of room for exploration in China. The earliest pioneer of content community in this respect is Douban. As early as ten years ago, Douban built an online Alpha City, and the street names were completely decided by residents’ voting. It also built its own economic system, using virtual currency "adzuki bean" to trade, and residents can open small shops themselves. Here you can see a variety of services, even "casinos" and "cemeteries".
Alpha City is more purely experimental, and in today’s popular words, it is the earliest community meta-universe in China.
Compared with Douban’s willful "lying flat", it is not qualified not to make money because it has raised a large amount of money all the way to today, and its valuation is equivalent to 3 bilibili, 4 Weibo and 20 Zhihu.
Source: Network
When the Community Convention was launched a year ago, many business brands questioned whether Little Red Book was against business. For example, various restrictions on "planting grass". Since Xiaohongshu launched the special treatment of illegal marketing in December 2021, 81 brands with illegal marketing behaviors have been banned, and 172,600 related notes and 53,600 illegal accounts have been handled, including some well-known brands. The reasons for the attack are mainly concentrated in non-compliant marketing behaviors such as false grass planting, amateur spreading, and writing on behalf of others.
Subsequently, the brand violation sub-system was launched to further standardize and improve business rules by gradient governance.
This series of measures, from the perspective of community atmosphere governance, are radical, but from the perspective of business, they are actually pre-rules, and community atmosphere and commercial realization are not irreconcilable.
In the recent Community Business Convention, Yin Shi, the head of community ecology in Xiaohongshu, further explained, "We hope to fully express our attitude through the publication of the Convention, and we welcome business very much. Business itself is to create value, which is completely consistent with the core of Little Red Book. Business prosperity is also a particularly important part of the community. "
In the face of Liu Qing’s doubts about consumerism, Conan explained that consumption is an objective behavior, unless the content about consumption appears in a small red book with high density, it can only rise to individualism when it reaches a certain extreme, and the anti-consumerism appearing in a small red book is used to present the diversity and inclusiveness of the community.
Dialogue between Liu Qing and Conan
In the final analysis, Xiaohongshu wants to establish a sustainable development cycle system and improve the efficiency of business with systematic ecology. Xiaohongshu chose the concept of "city" because for a city, commerce is actually an indispensable role for residents to live and work in peace and contentment, and even the prosperity of the city depends on the development of commerce.
From the perspective of community governance, from "city" to "convention", a set of self-consistency in operation logic is constructed to resolve the tense relationship between life sharing and commercial realization.
In the Convention on Community Commerce, the perfection of the two rules of "transaction" and "marketing" is also forcing the brand and KOC to standardize their business operations, and further gathering them into Xiaohongshu’s own dandelion platform for trading. However, the problem is that in the past, commercial and KOC bypassed the official transactions, in addition to maximizing the benefits, it was also because Xiaohongshu’s 10% two-way commission was much higher than the general 5% industry proportion of platforms such as Tik Tok.
After the supervision of Xiaohongshu has become stricter, it is even more necessary to answer a question. How to prove that it has higher conversion efficiency than other platforms? Especially today, when the new consumption trend is slowing down and the brand of online celebrity continues to charm.
In the "Convention" and the official public speech, Xiaohongshu particularly emphasized "truthfulness" and "sincerity", which means letting KOC recommend only the products it recognizes from the heart and letting the brand introduce its services objectively and simply. This sounds very good and has a long-term color, but it still faces many challenges in the actual landing process.
Source: rocket data
A number of insiders close to Xiaohongshu have said that Xiaohongshu’s revenue data in 2022 will triple that in 2021. In the face of this pressure,Can the action be kept unchanged during the implementation of the Convention? Moreover, if the path of advertising dependence remains unchanged, revenue growth cannot avoid the increase in the density of commercial content. How can this be balanced?
A city without business can’t work, but a city full of advertisements will make people want to escape.
Xiaohongshu has planned a utopian online city picture, but there will also be a false prosperity in the city. For example, the stalls are big and look glamorous, but the fiscal revenue is far from enough to cover the cost of public construction, the deficit is too large, and the balance is far away.
Before the massive investment and sky-high valuation, can the account of Xiaohongshu be counted?
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