Growing pains: When podcasts meet Xiaohongshu

This article mainly discusses how Xiaohongshu attracts and cultivates podcast hosts with their own unique styles, as well as some of the difficulties and challenges currently encountered in this regard.

At a time when the scarcity and instrumentality of platform content are gradually increasing, Xiaohongshu's traffic value still exists. Under this premise, if Xiaohongshu's platform rules and docking efficiency can be more friendly to external producers, perhaps the podcast hosts with "platform tonality" that Xiaohongshu wants will emerge in this fertile soil of traffic.

There are very few Internet platforms that are still on the offensive.

Xiaohongshu has always been different. While others are defensive, I am expanding.

As early as a year ago, when DAU (daily active users) had just reached 100 million, Xiaohongshu set a goal of "sitting one and watching three". To this end, Xiaohongshu has expanded significantly in less than two years, both in terms of business scope and talent density.

Whether it is the basic content community business or key businesses such as e-commerce and commercialization, the top management has been constantly replaced in less than two years, just to find the optimal solution for sustained growth. This is true for content ecology and commercialization.

The reason is simple. 100 million DAU may be a lot for a content community, but it is still not enough for a comprehensive platform that covers short videos, pictures, texts, live broadcasts, and has a booming monetization business.

It is not difficult to understand why Xiaohongshu is still not in a hurry to realize its value, but focuses on introducing more content forms. The recent support for podcast hosts is also one of the external manifestations of the "content-traffic-realization" idea.

Various signs show that whether it is e-commerce or content, Xiaohongshu has always been committed to creating "native bloggers with Xiaohongshu's tone", and the same is true for its support for podcasts this time.

However, as a type of media with low average information density and poor monetization efficiency among Internet media forms, it is still unknown whether Xiaohongshu can introduce and support podcasts to form a "Xiaohongshu tone". It is also unknown whether its media characteristics are compatible with Xiaohongshu's "strong tool" attributes.

1. Go to Xiaohongshu and watch podcasts

In the eyes of most podcast producers, Xiaohongshu is the "last promised land" of the Chinese Internet, both in terms of the increase in followers and the speed of monetization.

A podcast producer told Lujiu Business Review that the core basis for making this judgment comes from Xiaohongshu's own search mechanism and the long-tail effect of traffic. As long as the content theme is high enough to be searched by users, or it fits the algorithm mechanism, then the traffic and interactive conversion will most likely not be bad.

However, after joining the podcast docking group, Lujiu Business Review found that the podcast format envisioned by Xiaohongshu may be different from the expectations of podcast producers.

First of all, in terms of the entry standards, Xiaohongshu requires that the number of fans of podcast hosts on Xiaoyuzhou (a podcast APP) must be more than 1,000. Judging from the commercial standards of "hundreds of fans accepting orders" for some vertical podcasts in some industries, a Xiaoyuzhou podcast of this size is at least above the mid-level.

Secondly, in terms of content type, it also fits the most frequent content tracks of "Xiaohongshu", such as workplace psychology, self-growth, lifestyle, law and finance, etc. However, for podcast hosts, Xiaohongshu has additional content requirements: there should be practical and professional content, and story output in the form of dialogue.

The format also needs to be live broadcast——

As we all know, as a form of media that exists in the form of audio, regardless of whether the subject is prepared in advance, its content production process is bound to be non-instantaneous. There is always a time difference between "content upload - user listening".

Of course, there is a need to do so. On the one hand, whether it is a story-telling or conversation-based podcast, its content production will inevitably produce invalid information and unplanned sensitive information. These redundant contents often need to be processed by the podcast host during post-editing to increase the information density and thus improve the audience's listening experience.

Once it switches to live streaming, it is not the same. On the one hand, as an instant content medium, in addition to the pre-prepared live streaming script, the podcast host must rely on instant reactions to conduct live streaming. Although their own knowledge reserves can be used for relevant live streaming, compared with more sophisticated podcasts, the content quality of the podcast is unlikely to be better than that of the podcast under the same topic.

More importantly, as information media, the significance of live streaming and podcasts is actually quite different.

2. The distance from live broadcast to podcast

If we only look at the content of the two, the difference between podcasts and live broadcasts is not that big. Of course, this only refers to the level of knowledge live broadcasts and conversation live broadcasts. In terms of performance, both are presented in the form of "face to screen", supplemented by conversation content with a strong sense of "dry goods". It seems that on the surface, this is just the difference between whether the host is willing to "spend time on the screen" and "spend time editing".

However, the cost of a "live podcast" varies greatly among different types of podcast hosts. On the one hand, not all podcast hosts are willing to appear on camera, and the first challenge they face is to overcome their fear of facing the camera and interacting in the live broadcast room. In other words, there are more uncontrollable factors during live broadcasts, and the host's on-the-spot adaptability and camera sense are required to be stronger, but in the production of one-way podcasts, these issues do not need to be considered.

In addition, if you are a female podcast producer, you will inevitably have to deal with makeup. If you have requirements for your on-camera effect, the time and cost spent are often several times more than that of a male podcast producer, not to mention the podcast production and editing after the live broadcast.

Moreover, compared with North America, where podcast culture is prevalent, domestic podcasts started later and commercialization is also insufficient. Therefore, although content quality is also one of the considerations, its importance is much lower than that of live broadcasts.

A senior industry podcast producer told Lujiu Business Review that in China, podcast producers usually have three main purposes for producing a podcast: expanding the industry circle, uniting the industry circle, and producing the content itself. The purposes here are also prioritized, with the content itself being placed last.

The reason is simple. In China, apart from the gossip and weird stories of the "storytelling" nature, most podcasts exist in the form of industry knowledge podcasts. If you want to do this kind of content well, an important prerequisite is to "get involved in the circle well." But you usually can't have both.

Therefore, we can see that most of the leading podcast brands in the industry often have their commercialization forms outside of podcasts, either through "private board meetings" with annual fees, industry salons, or commercial cooperation projects, but not through paying for the content and its derivatives. This happens to be the main consumer of live broadcasts.

Based on this logic, even if podcast producers flock to Xiaohongshu because of its generous traffic support plan, Xiaohongshu will have difficulty participating in most of the monetization process. It can be seen that the threshold is high enough.

Podcast producers are discouraged

According to Lujiu Business Review, this podcast support plan belongs to Xiaohongshu's community business. Therefore, the support for podcasts is probably also based on the consideration of content ecology, with the purpose of attracting more types of users to Xiaohongshu.

However, based on Lujiu Business Review's contact with several podcast producers, some producers are not very willing to join Xiaohongshu to operate podcasts.

A podcast producer with experience in large companies told Lujiu Business Review that judging from the resource strength of the support plan, the operational authority of this project will most likely not be very high.

However, with limited support resources, producers need to put in extra effort and carry out additional operations on Xiaohongshu. The live broadcast mentioned above is one aspect, and signing various additional regulations is another. There are various additional costs involved in the process - unlike other platforms, most of which only require distribution.

In addition, the frequent internal changes of the platform's front-line executives also result in the efficiency of external resources connecting to Xiaohongshu being lower than other content platforms.

A podcast producer in the health industry, who has previously worked with Xiaohongshu on some commercial projects, told Lujiu Business Review that one of the most intuitive feelings Xiaohongshu gave her was that the front-line executives were under great pressure. A simple example is that a grassroots operator may have two or three projects in progress at the same time, and the policies of these projects may change overnight due to changes in the will of the top management.

At the same time, this also leads to a high turnover of project liaison personnel. Often, if a cross-departmental project has a long enough cycle, the liaison personnel will be constantly replaced, and when it comes to problem solving, the problem will be passed around between different departments, and it will take a long time to find a suitable liaison person.

The direct result is that when commercial projects are connected, simple problems become complicated and eventually fail. For example, if a celebrity blogger who has not been certified by the platform wants to promote his notes commercially, he must not only purchase a traffic package like ordinary bloggers, but also sign a series of agreements with the platform, open a designated celebrity account, and comply with a series of regulations of the platform.

However, when many celebrities use Xiaohongshu, their mentality is the same as when they use WeChat Moments, and they post updates casually. However, due to the complex and changeable platform rules of Xiaohongshu, such cooperation opportunities are often lost.

Based on the above reasons, she is not inclined to join Xiaohongshu to do podcast live broadcasts, because she has already had enough psychological shadows from previous commercial project collaborations.

For the same reason, it is self-evidently difficult for podcasts, a media form, to obtain a higher content priority under Xiaohongshu’s ever-changing content strategy.

However, as the scarcity and instrumentality of platform content gradually increase, Xiaohongshu's traffic value still exists. Under this premise, if Xiaohongshu's platform rules and docking efficiency can be more friendly to external producers, perhaps the podcast hosts with "platform characteristics" that Xiaohongshu wants will emerge in this fertile soil of traffic.