Employees who left big companies are flooding Xiaohongshu, creating a new money-making track

Many bloggers who have resigned from their jobs have emerged on Xiaohongshu. How has resignation become a business? This article explains the relevant content from four aspects. Let's take a look.

Resigned bloggers are becoming the most crowded track on Xiaohongshu.

Recently, I often see complaints: "Xiaohongshu is no longer worth reading, it's full of bloggers who have resigned." Many posts such as "I earn 50,000 yuan a month after resigning from ByteDance", "How to make 10,000 yuan a month with a side job after quitting a big company", and "I quit to become a full-time blogger, I never want to go to work again!" stimulate the sensitive and fragile nerves of those working people who are trembling with fear of being laid off on the one hand, and extremely hate going to work on the other.

In every late night when one is tortured by work, in every early morning when one is crowded in the subway, when one is cursing “I can’t even go one day through this crappy job”, seeing posts like this will inevitably make many people eager to try, fantasizing about their own happy life.

How did quitting a job go from being a shame to being flaunted, and finally becoming a business?

1. Bloggers who left their jobs during the unemployment wave

In early March, Xiaohongshu user "Ayingla" casually posted a post saying "I will quit if I get 100 likes", complaining about her three-hour commute to work and useless meetings that lasted for three hours, and she really wanted to quit her job.

Netizens, in line with the principle of "supporting every dream" and watching the excitement, traffic poured in. So far, this content has received 1 million views, 280,000 likes, 30,000 comments, and 3,000 favorites.

Before this, Ah Ying was completely unknown on Xiaohongshu. This was her first post. She was surprised and said, "I have never seen so many likes in my life! I didn't expect it was caused by leaving my job."

Aying's subsequent posts all revolved around resignation: the struggles before resignation, her parents' disapproval, talking to her boss about resignation, life after resignation, etc. However, traffic did not favor this new resignation blogger again. Among the millions of people watching the excitement, only about 2,000 people stayed and followed her, and she has not made any money yet.

However, this method has been imitated by many people: posting a message saying "I will quit if I get a certain number of likes" and attaching a photo of a work badge from a large company can easily get an astonishing number of views. It has been proven to be effective and has become the way for many bloggers who have resigned to start their own accounts.

Judging from the work badges that were posted, there are many well-known Internet giants such as ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Huawei, Meituan, and Kuaishou. The titles are also more diverse: "On my last day at work, ByteDance spent 500,000 yuan on me", "Ali's last day, I tell you everything", "The start-up funds for Wilderness Life have arrived, next stop is Bali", etc.

Why are there so many bloggers leaving Xiaohongshu suddenly?

The obvious reason is that since 2022, the Internet industry has lost its glory and continued to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and large companies have frequently reported layoffs. For example, ByteDance has successively laid off business lines such as education, pico, games, and Feishu; Tencent had 10,000 fewer employees last year than the year before; Alibaba had 14,000 fewer employees in the first quarter of this year, and 54,000 fewer employees compared to two years ago.

For some people, leaving their blog is just an attempt during the transition period of unemployment. Their work experience in large companies has made them well versed in traffic routines. After having 1,000 fans on Xiaohongshu, it is possible to accept advertising and monetize. The threshold is relatively low. As long as the content is good, the platform is not stingy with traffic, which has attracted many people to try. But most of them only try briefly and stop updating after finding a new job.

The hidden reason is people’s anxiety and confusion about their careers. When the industry was growing rapidly, it was like riding a high-speed elevator. When the industry growth slowed down, it was difficult to increase salaries or job levels, which made people doubt the meaning of work and their own abilities.

Many people can't help but wonder: Once you leave the platform, what can you accomplish on your own?

Xiao Liu has worked in a large Internet company in Xi'erqi for 6 years as a product manager. It sounds glamorous, but in reality he just has to obey his boss's wishes every day and do minor repairs like changing the color of buttons.

In such a job, she could not find any sense of accomplishment, and her promotion was repeatedly blocked. For a while, she was very eager to "achieve a milestone achievement" to prove herself. So she registered a Weibo account in the field of workplace humor and gained more than 300,000 followers. Although she did not think about how to monetize it at the time, it also gave her great confidence and a sense of security.

Nowadays, the popular platform has changed from Weibo to Xiaohongshu. More and more people from large companies, who live under the shadow of not knowing when they will be laid off, come to Xiaohongshu to open accounts and become bloggers, thinking that even if they lose their jobs in the future, they will still have something to hold onto.

2. Resignation: From Anxiety to Business

Times have changed. In the past, people would feel ashamed of being unemployed and would wish to leave a little time gap before immediately moving on to the next job. But now, people are so optimistic and open-minded about advertising this, and even regard it as a label.

For them, the resigned blogger is just a persona, and monetization is the fundamental purpose.

Currently, there are various ways for bloggers who have left their jobs to monetize: accepting advertisements from brands; helping people revise their resumes, and providing interview training to teach them how to get jobs in large companies; being a training instructor for Xiaohongshu to teach people how to be bloggers; selling Xiaohongshu operating materials; and some people combine their original work experience to promote products and visit factories.

Accepting advertisements is the most common way. Currently, the price a blogger gets for a post on Xiaohongshu is about one-tenth of the number of his followers.

A blogger who left ByteDance currently has 26,000 followers, charges 4,000 for text and picture notes, 4,500 for video notes, and earns 10,000 to 20,000 yuan a month. But there are also bloggers with lower average customer prices, such as a blogger who has worked at Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba. He currently has 12,000 followers, charges only 300 for text and picture notes, and 500 for video notes.

Although the Internet's halo is fading, it is still the preferred choice of many job seekers, especially fresh graduates. According to the 2023 college student employment questionnaire survey data from Zhaopin.com, the Internet industry ranks first among the industries that graduates expect to work in. Therefore, it is also a good business for bloggers who have left large companies to teach their teachers to join large companies.

Xiao Zhao also worked in a large factory in Xi'erqi. Her account mainly shares practical workplace information. She builds a community by providing internal referral opportunities, and then promotes her products on WeChat Moments, WeChat groups and other places. She provides her audience with one-stop services such as resume modification, mock interviews, career planning, and resignation guidance, with prices ranging from several hundred to thousands of yuan.

After some bloggers have mastered the model of creating an account, connecting with the media, and establishing an IP on the platform, they have opened a Xiaohongshu personal IP camp to teach people how to become bloggers. From positioning, topic selection, note-taking to drawing and video making, they provide full-process nanny-level services, with a price of thousands of yuan per month. In addition, there are also one-on-one private teaching and consulting services, and the income is very considerable.

Some bloggers share their operating experience on the Newspaper Boy platform. Users pay to read their articles, with prices ranging from tens to hundreds of yuan. The bloggers share the profits with the platform. Some bloggers have already achieved thousands of subscribers and earned hundreds of thousands of yuan.

The above services are basically centered around how to get a job at a large company and how to become a Xiaohongshu blogger. There is also a type of bloggers who have left their jobs and created their own unique monetization model.

The blogger's profile is "a former senior waiter at Alibaba, who has served thousands of merchants and is now a professional factory explorer who plans to visit hundreds of source factories and help good factories find sales channels." The blogger will show product details, product production process, factory atmosphere, etc. in his video notes, and then sell the products on Xiaohongshu to make a profit as a new middleman.

In short, the monthly income of successful bloggers is equal to or even much higher than their original salary. However, there is a kind of survivor bias, and most people give up this path before they start to realize their income.

3. Actually, you are working for the platform

Resigned bloggers seem free and unrestrained, but in fact they are full of anxiety.

To accept advertising, you must first cross the threshold of 1,000 followers. A post shared a quick way to reach 1,000 followers: establish a persona, let people know at a glance what you do and what benefits you can bring; continue to publish content in the same field; keep the content style consistent and prominent; update it at a rhythm; collect similar popular notes and disassemble them, imitate them first and then differentiate them.

This requires the development of a variety of abilities. For example, topic selection ability requires paying attention to current hot topics and recording topic inspiration anytime and anywhere; copywriting ability requires being able to clearly express one's own ideas; picture production ability, a good cover can greatly increase the click-through rate; data analysis ability, review and optimize based on data; and photography, videography and editing ability, etc.

Of course, the most important thing is learning ability. When a blogger outputs content continuously and steadily, there is input before there is output. This is equivalent to a comprehensive test of a person's comprehensive ability, which is not as simple as imagined.

Although there are many successful people who can build their accounts in half a month or a month, ordinary people usually have to go through a long and arduous process. A blogger shared that it took him 7 months to get his first 500 followers, and 39 days to get the next 500 followers. How can you not doubt yourself when you think you have done every step well, but still have no followers in the past 7 months?

Moreover, the content of the resignation blogger track is difficult to sustain. It is nothing more than liking resignation, the resignation process, and the resignation follow-up, followed by the dull and trivial daily life, which inevitably makes people lose interest. Being in this track also means selling personal privacy and telling your own story for everyone to examine. Negative comments make people extremely exhausted. So some people choose to post practical workplace information instead, create a professional image, and then provide courses, consultations, interviews and other services to make money.

In addition, you have to keep the update frequency of daily and weekly updates, and each note takes at least 2 hours. Doesn’t it feel like working? In fact, being a blogger is working for the platform, and the money earned from advertising is equivalent to the salary paid by the platform.

Why do you say that? If you want to take advertising every month, you must produce a certain number of notes and ensure that the data of the notes is above a baseline. If the data does not meet the standard, it will be difficult for brands to place ads.

This is to maintain the prosperity of the entire platform, and if you perform well, you will get a share of the advertising fees. If you work in a company doing new media operations, you will get a salary of about 10,000 yuan per month, and you will also post notes, and there will be editing and art colleagues to cooperate with you. If you are a blogger yourself, you will post more articles every month, but you can only receive advertising of a few hundred or a few thousand yuan.

Advertisements are completely dependent on luck. Brands only look for bloggers to place ads during major promotions such as new product launches, 618, and Double 11. When the market is good, you can earn tens of thousands of yuan a month, but when the market is bad, you will earn nothing, and you don’t know when the brand will favor you again.

Sometimes accepting advertisements is also a kind of harm to the account. If you accept advertisements that do not match the tone of the account, you will be questioned as "making money" in minutes, and then you will be restricted and unfollowed. Even so, looking around, there are still so many bloggers of the same kind who are waiting to be fed.

In today's market situation, brands are also having a hard time. When new consumption was popular a few years ago, self-media received a lot of advertising. Now brands have also tightened their belts, carefully selecting bloggers with high cost-effectiveness, carefully calculating the input-output ratio for each placement, and giving priority to bloggers who can bring more goods.

The former bloggers seem to have a good background, resume, post data, and fan portrait, but from the perspective of brands, beauty brands prefer beauty bloggers, and maternal and infant brands prefer maternal and infant bloggers. What kind of products can the former bloggers bring?

Therefore, on the supply side, there are too many bloggers leaving; on the demand side, brands are shrinking, so naturally the number of advertisements they can receive is decreasing.

Some people say that this year, it is more than 10 times more difficult to run a self-media business than in previous years. Being a blogger is a small business in itself, but many people want to use it as a backup after losing their jobs. It is normal for reality to go against expectations.

A blogger shared: Before I became a blogger, I arranged my life well. I got up early every day to walk the dog, chat with friends, cook at home, and learn English. Since I became a blogger, my energy and time have been unconsciously stolen by Xiaohongshu. My life is repetitive every day, and there are not many interesting things. Every day, my mind is full of shooting materials, thinking of titles, and worrying about data. I don’t have the freedom and ease I had before. I am more focused on creating a certain personality. I can’t focus on life, and I can’t really settle down to be myself.

So she decided to give up being a blogger.

4. Can you still be happy while making money?

In fact, whether you are working or quitting your job, being a blogger or doing something else, there is only one core proposition: how to make money while being happy and joyful?

We easily accept that work itself is painful and meaningless, and the purpose of work is just to have a decent income to pay off mortgages, car loans, support parents and children, and have a decent social status to interact with others. Even if the work is not going well, we dare not quit easily, fearing that the quality of life will suddenly decline.

It’s hard for us to ask ourselves: Do I really love this job? Does this job make me happy? Do I have time to do truly meaningful things? Does the work I do reflect my own value? Do I spend enough time with my family and friends?

It is even more difficult for us to ask: Are work and happiness inherently contradictory? Does the so-called vocation really exist?

The pace of life of most Chinese people is designed around work. If you are unhappy at work, you will not only be unhappy during the 8 hours at work, but also the time before and after work.

Going further, how should we deal with the relationship between work, money and happiness in life?

Money naturally brings happiness. But Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman found in his research on money and happiness that beyond a certain level of abundance, more money does not buy more happiness.

A survey showed that when people were asked how much money they would need to be satisfied, regardless of their income level, everyone answered: 50% more than I have now. When rating their happiness from 1 to 5, there was no significant difference between the highest and lowest earners.

This suggests that the real secret to success is to develop a conscious, clear, and proactive relationship with money, rather than being obsessed with earning a certain "number."

"Having more" is a bottomless pit of desire, but more does not mean better. Many truly good things are free, such as sunny weather, fresh air, beautiful sunsets, and free time with family. We need to figure out how much money we need to live the life we ​​love.

If we spend more time working and get higher returns, these leisure time will become priced and we can calculate how much money we lose based on hourly wages. Is sacrificing personal happiness for work really what we want?

Human similarities far outweigh differences, and centuries of philosophical thinking have found that several universally recognized elements of human happiness apply to everyone, such as friendship, health, community belonging, meeting challenges with one's own wisdom, and a sense of control over life. These are all sources of happiness.

Real financial freedom is not having to work for money, not retiring after earning enough money. This idea is a fantasy of a happy ending, but happiness is not the ending, but every moment of life.

So for us, work should not only be a means of making a living, but also a way of self-realization.

Since we cannot change the overall environment, we can at least change the micro-environment. We can still decide what to do every day, every hour, and every minute.

Therefore, when we choose a job, we need to introduce the measure of life energy in addition to money. Can this job make us feel happy and joyful? Does it match our values ​​and interests? Can it help us realize our self-worth?

If there is such a job, then this is our vocation. It may be far from the stability, respectability and glamour in traditional values, but so what? Working hard is for a happy life, not for anything else.

References:

1. Money or Life by CITIC Publishing Group

2. Rainbow Line "Happiness Points"

3. Face-to-face interview: "How do test takers and test takers answer the question of happiness?"