In 2023, Douyin will fall in love with pictures and texts, and Xiaohongshu will fall in love with e-commerce live streaming

In the context of the peak of Internet growth, major companies are trying their best to compete for users and traffic. ByteDance's "New Grass" and "Croissant" failed to work, so they imitated Xiaohongshu to add picture and text sections in Douyin. Xiaohongshu is committed to live streaming and selling goods. The software we are familiar with is also quietly changing.

In recent years, major companies have not had a good time, especially in 2023.

Various small measures to reduce costs and increase efficiency have made workers exclaim: Oh my God! Why is life so difficult? Are we going to graduate soon?

In addition to reducing costs and increasing efficiency, the major giants are also eyeing the fields of other giants. When their own track has reached its peak, it is indeed a good choice for them to squeeze into other tracks with successful cases.

1. ByteDance wants to have a “Little Red Book”

At a time when the growth of the Internet has peaked, the most important thing is to compete for users and traffic. If others eat less, you can eat more. Xiaohongshu, a content community with 100 million daily active users, has made many giants envious. Douyin and its parent company (ByteDance) hope to support Douyin's e-commerce and local life businesses through the form of text and picture planting. The former is the top priority of Douyin's current business segment, and the latter is the next battlefield for major giants. In addition, text and picture planting is a key step in Douyin's e-commerce expansion. After users are attracted by text and picture planting, they place orders directly in Douyin, forming a closed transaction loop.

Therefore, ByteDance made a decisive move. It "planted grass" all the way, but the "grass" never grew. As early as 2018, ByteDance launched a grass-planting APP called "New Grass" to create a "grass-planting community that young people are browsing."

As a content community app, Xincao APP has a UI that is very similar to Toutiao, lacking in freshness and playability. This product uses Toutiao's logic to build a content community, so it is inevitable that it will not be well adapted to the local environment.

On the left is Xincao, on the right is Toutiao. Image source: 36Kr

In less than a year, the Xincao APP disappeared without making any splash.

Although the first attempt did not work well, ByteDance did not give up and continued to try. In July 2022, ByteDance launched the Croissant APP with the slogan "Define Your Vitality".

This APP looks so similar to Xiaohongshu that it is no exaggeration to say that they are twins.

Like Xiaohongshu, Croissant uses a double waterfall display format, with pictures, texts and videos arranged alternately.

Croissant on the left, Xiaohongshu on the right Image source: Tiger Sniff

Obviously, the Croissant APP is a competitor to Xiaohongshu. However, less than 20 days after its launch, the Croissant APP was removed from all major app stores. In the content community race, ByteDance, nicknamed the "APP factory" by netizens, has failed.

2. Douyin, fighting for the father, transforms into "Little Red Book"

Perhaps ByteDance realized that instead of choosing from 0 to 1, it would be better to make a slight modification to Douyin and add an experience channel as the first-level entrance on the Douyin homepage.

Image source: TikTok

This channel uses a double waterfall display format, with pictures, texts and short videos as the main content forms, with pictures and texts being the majority. At first glance, it really looks like Xiaohongshu.

Image source: TikTok

Image source: Xiaohongshu

Is it TikTok that cheated, or is it Xiaohongshu that cheated?

We cannot say they are exactly the same, we can only say they are completely consistent.

Douyin still can’t forget “Little Red Book”.

It will take time to prove whether picture and text promotion can truly be integrated into the entire ecosystem of Douyin and help the development of e-commerce.

3. Xiaohongshu e-commerce, repeatedly failed, repeatedly failed

In the field of picture and text recommendation, Xiaohongshu is definitely a boss. In 2022, the average usage time of Xiaohongshu was 55.31 minutes, the monthly active creators and the average daily number of published notes were 20 million and 3 million respectively, and the average daily search query volume was nearly 300 million.

These data are very impressive, and the major giants are getting anxious.

In addition to the aforementioned Douyin, other giants have also made their own moves. For example, Alibaba's "Guangguang", JD's "Zhongcaoxiu", Pinduoduo's "Pinxiaoquan", Tencent's "Penguin Huimai", and Meituan's "Zhenxiang". In this situation, Xiaohongshu can't help but sweat, and it is no exaggeration to say that it is surrounded by enemies.

Fortunately, Xiaohongshu has its own moat, with high user stickiness, strong spending power, and a good interactive atmosphere, and it will not suffer a fatal shock in the short term.

Xiaohongshu has always used "being yourself", "getting rid of marketing" and "living" as the keynote to specify its operation strategy, focusing on people rather than things. Unlike Douyin's extreme efficiency and algorithm-first approach, Xiaohongshu cares more about the "warmth" of the content community, communication between people, and providing valuable content.

When reading every note on Xiaohongshu, I feel like I am communicating with real people.

This year, Xiaohongshu has made a lot of moves and seems to be no longer indifferent. This is because Xiaohongshu is facing a very serious problem, that is, commercialization.

For Xiaohongshu, commercialization may destroy the harmonious community atmosphere that it is proud of. Since its establishment, Xiaohongshu's commercialization exploration has been stumbling, which may indirectly prove Xiaohongshu's entanglement and confusion in balancing commercial and content community attributes.

In 2022, Xiaohongshu's revenue is about 30 billion yuan, of which 24 billion yuan is advertising revenue, accounting for as much as 80%. Due to the uncertainty of advertising revenue, such a high proportion of advertising revenue is not a good phenomenon strictly speaking.

Xiaohongshu chose e-commerce as another outlet for its commercial monetization.

In 2014, Xiaohongshu launched its own e-commerce platform "Welfare Society" to develop cross-border e-commerce business. In the first year of its launch, its GMV exceeded 300 million yuan.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

However, the good times did not last long. Due to its own shortcomings in suppliers, logistics, and channels, it was difficult to ensure the authenticity of the goods and the fair prices. In addition, with the impact of the launch of platforms such as Tmall Global and Kaola, Xiaohongshu's self-operated e-commerce was in danger. It can be said that it was a pity to throw it away.

In August 2020, Xiaohongshu started internal testing of inserting Taobao external links. In the same year, Douyin's e-commerce live broadcast GMV exceeded 500 billion, which gave a little shock to the peers and reminded everyone that e-commerce can still do this.

At this time, many peers immediately followed suit, planning e-commerce live streaming and establishing an e-commerce ecosystem, but Xiaohongshu did not take any action.

In June 2021, Xiaohongshu launched the internal testing of the WeChat applet jump port. In August of the same year, Xiaohongshu launched the "account and store integration" and closed the permission to post external links in notes, marking that Xiaohongshu's attempt to cooperate with friendly companies finally fell into the sea.

The self-operated e-commerce platform "Little Oasis" was launched in 2022, but it was hastily closed a year later due to low data. The welfare club, which has been online for 9 years, is also preparing to officially close on November 16 this year.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu has really come a long way with many bumps and bruises.

4. Xiaohongshu, a buyer e-commerce platform, is the future

It was not until 2023 that Xiaohongshu began to develop e-commerce live streaming, hoping to break the curse of e-commerce monetization.

For e-commerce live streaming, Xiaohongshu has found a model that suits it, that is, buyer e-commerce. Xiaohongshu COO Conan defines Xiaohongshu's buyer-based e-commerce as "community e-commerce", and buyer e-commerce seems to be a good new story.

Image source: Ebang Power

Compared with other e-commerce live broadcasts that are "fast", Xiaohongshu's buyer-based e-commerce is more accustomed to "slow", which is related to the tonality of its own platform. From the current data, Xiaohongshu's buyer-based e-commerce has achieved initial results.

In January this year, Dong Jie made her first live broadcast on Xiaohongshu, ranking first on the daily ranking of Xiaohongshu's sales, with the GMV of the first three live broadcasts reaching 50 million, 30 million and 73 million respectively. In May of the same year, Zhang Jingchu made her first live broadcast on Xiaohongshu, with an estimated total GMV of 2.86 million yuan.

On the eve of the Double 11 promotion, Xiaohongshu finally gave birth to its first anchor whose revenue exceeded 100 million in a single show.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

On October 16, the first generation of live streaming queen Zhang Xiaohui's sales exceeded 100 million yuan. Although compared with the top anchors on other platforms who can easily make over 100 million or even 1 billion yuan, there is still a big gap. However, overall, the buyer-based e-commerce has opened up a new path for the commercialization of Xiaohongshu.

At present, the overall ecology of buyer-based e-commerce is still relatively weak, there are few buyers in the middle, and the balance between community and live broadcast needs to be improved. Of course, the above problems are just some of the difficulties encountered by Xiaohongshu buyer-based e-commerce, and the future is still unclear.

Tik Tok, fall in love with pictures and texts.

Xiaohongshu, fall in love with e-commerce live streaming.

Perhaps, they all have a bright future.

Author: Weaving

WeChat public account: Weiguojiang {ID: wjam123456）