Dong Jie's Buddhist style has become popular, and Xiaohongshu has learned to be fierce

After forming a unique content ecosystem, monetization and commercialization have become Xiaohongshu's goals. In an era when super-headline anchors are gradually leaving the stage, Dong Jie, as a typical representative of celebrities entering Xiaohongshu, has brought unexpected traffic to Xiaohongshu's monetization. After Dong Jie, where will Xiaohongshu's commercialization go? Standing on the fulcrum, how to balance the seesaw of content and monetization is an eternal topic left for Xiaohongshu.

"You're not going to film anymore?"

After four live broadcasts and becoming the sales queen of Xiaohongshu, this is the question Dong Jie is most often asked.

In mid-April, Dong Jie appeared at the launch conference of her new drama in a white T-shirt and jeans. Later, she said in an interview with the "Houlang Research Institute": "Live streaming enriches my life, but it will not change my original intention of filming."

If Dong Jie's live broadcast room is a hit that is unique to Xiaohongshu, then the current situation is that you have not waited for the next big hit. "Where is the next Dong Jie?" has been the biggest topic about Xiaohongshu since the second live broadcast in February this year set off the Internet.

If we return to the first principles and apply the sentence structure most commonly used by Zhihu answerers: first ask whether it is, then ask what to do.

Live streaming is not all about Dong Jie, and Dong Jie is not all about the commercialization of Xiaohongshu.

Of course, the gap between Dong Jie and other anchors is obvious. April 28 was her fourth live broadcast on Xiaohongshu. At 9:35 that night, Dong Jie's popularity on Xiaohongshu's real-time "sales ranking" reached 180 million, 170 million ahead of the second place. It is not an exaggeration to describe her as "a leader in the field".

So the question is, "Does Xiaohongshu want to copy the next Dong Jie?"

"Xiaohongshu's traffic may not be able to support more Dong Jies, and it is likely to siphon off the attention of mid-level influencers," Du Chengjin, the brand manager of "Qingzhiyang", told "Blue Hole Business". "Although top anchors are good for brands, and problems that can be solved in five minutes do not take longer; but for the platform, this is not a healthy state."

With the evolution of the live broadcast ecosystem, the era of super-head anchors has become a thing of the past. Live broadcasting is not the ultimate answer to Xiaohongshu's commercialization, and "copying Dong Jie" is more of a false proposition speculated by the outside world.

But when it comes to making money, Xiaohongshu is no longer restrained.

In March this year, the company made an organizational restructuring in an attempt to resolve the struggle between community and commercialization that had plagued the platform for many years. In the past month, Xiaohongshu has been making frequent moves around commercialization, from entering local life to internal testing of "notes to bring goods".

"How to buy?" "Private" dialogues appear in the comment section of almost every popular note on Xiaohongshu. Different from other e-commerce platforms, Xiaohongshu's users are calling for commercialization. In the short term, Xiaohongshu's commercialization is rare and not annoying.

Standing on the fulcrum, how to balance the seesaw of content and monetization is an eternal topic left for Xiaohongshu.

1. What did Dong Jie bring to Xiaohongshu?

Before discussing "copying" Dong Jie, let's take a look at what Dong Jie brought to Xiaohongshu. At the beginning, she was just one of the many stars who joined Xiaohongshu. She was not the first, nor the most popular one.

According to existing data, in April 2017, Lin Yun, who became famous for Stephen Chow's movies but was exposed for her "dark history" at the time, took the lead in sharing her life notes and beauty content on Xiaohongshu. Because most of her favorite items were affordable and good-quality items that students could afford, she quickly gained a lot of favor. Since then, celebrities have continued to join Xiaohongshu.

Before live streaming, Dong Jie also loved posting notes on Xiaohongshu and sharing her daily life, until Xiaohongshu and her team asked her: Do you want to try live streaming? Perhaps it was inevitable in an accident, Dong Jie's style and Xiaohongshu's users and platform tone had a wonderful chemical reaction, which was exactly the effect that Xiaohongshu was looking for.

For the platform, real income is certain, but its greater value lies in opening up another possible marketing scenario for Xiaohongshu for brands, and also opening up a commercial gap under the pressure of Taobao and Douyin live broadcasts.

Public data shows that Douyin's daily active users have already exceeded 600 million, while Xiaohongshu is still hovering around 100 million. Although Xiaohongshu has grown rapidly, there is still a large gap in traffic. But since Dong Jie became popular, more and more businesses have seen the full-process brand display chain brought by Xiaohongshu's unique traffic field. "Qingzhiyang" is a tea brand that focuses on medicine and food. Starting from the first live broadcast, they participated in three consecutive live broadcasts of Dong Life.

Du Chengjin admitted, "In fact, we also wanted to participate in the fourth live broadcast, but Dong Jie's team was worried that repeated product selection would make consumers lose their sense of freshness." "Long tail" and "multiple touch points" are the reasons why most brands favor Xiaohongshu and Dong Jie's live broadcast room. Du Chengjin said, "Many orders are completed a long time after Dong Jie's live broadcast, and some are even completed after 30 days."

Coincidentally, the owner of the niche designer brand RoundFace, who appeared in Dong Jie's live broadcast room, also introduced in a podcast program: "After the live broadcast, we gained a large wave of new fans, and the residual heat after the live broadcast has still been there."

This feature also allows brands to see the difference between Xiaohongshu and Tmall and Douyin in terms of channel positioning: Tmall has the most complete business chain data and is similar to the brand's "official website". On this platform, the audience can be accurately positioned. But the problem is that the competition between Tmall and Taobao is very fierce, and it is difficult for new brands to stand out.

Douyin is a natural "consumption venue" that allows channels and consumers to get to know the brand faster and solve the problem of basic sales. Last year, a live broadcast of "Light Nourishing" on Douyin brought in 1 million sales. But behind the effect, Douyin's customer unit price is not high, and the fan stickiness is low. "Impulsive" orders on "interest" e-commerce platforms often rely on the rendering of scenes and atmosphere. "Douyin's sales are usually in the five minutes of live broadcasting, and it is difficult to have repeat purchases after that." Du Chengjin said.

Xiaohongshu is a "grass-planting field". Users generally do not make orders impulsively, but browse other notes of the brand on Xiaohongshu, observe the overall performance and then make a decision. Therefore, the popularity will last for a month or longer. According to Qingzhiyang, "Xiaohongshu's regular customer rate is about two to three times that of Douyin." An interesting point is that brands on Xiaohongshu often care more about the brand communication effect rather than the sales amount.

The answer may be found from the consumer side: taking Dong Jie's live broadcast as an example, from product selection to live broadcast to order posting, the brand has appeared on Xiaohongshu at least four times.

"Dong Jie will release a product selection video a few days before the live broadcast. This is her first exposure. The live broadcast will see a peak in attention on the day. Dong Jie will match the products with her outfits, and introduce the brand story and the background of the manager. The replay will be retained for 48 hours after the live broadcast, and orders can still be placed during this period. After confirming receipt, unlike the evaluation labels of other platforms, Xiaohongshu has set up a "show order" function. For a period of time after the live broadcast, you will see the sharing notes of orders placed in Dong Jie's live broadcast room." A consumer who has placed orders many times in Dong Jie's live broadcast room told "Blue Hole Business".

The complete and long-tail display chain and the relatively rational purchasing atmosphere make it an excellent display entry point for new niche brands.

It is easy for anyone with a discerning eye to see that Dong Jie's live broadcast room is a smaller version of Xiaohongshu's tone display, and it is also a multi-directional rush of platforms, anchors, niche brands and target users. Among the nearly 50 selected brands in each broadcast, you can hardly see any well-known mass brands.

This kind of exposure is difficult for traffic platforms to replicate. The manager of a startup brand that focuses on high-end pet food told "Blue Hole Business", "The slot fee for Dong Jie's live broadcast room is 40,000 yuan. In fact, it is cheaper to make a friend. If it is an ordinary anchor, it only costs 10,000 yuan, and Mr. Luo costs 50,000 yuan. However, they have requirements for sales volume, and our brand is too small to achieve it."

2. “Copying” is not possible and is not necessary

Dong Jie's value is unquestionable, but does Xiaohongshu need to "copy" Dong Jie? One premise is that the emergence of super-head anchors is often a coincidence in inevitability.

A ready-made example is that after Viya, the top influencer in online shopping on Taobao, left the stage, Qianxun, founded by her and her husband, incubated three live streaming rooms, namely "Bee Surprise Club", "Bee Happy Club" and "Bee Wish Club". According to a report by "LatePost", the total GMV of the three clubs was only more than 6 billion yuan last year, while the GMV of Meiwan, where Li Jiaqi worked, was 65 billion yuan in the same year. Qianxun, which left Viya, did not successfully replicate itself.

After Dong Jie became famous, more and more celebrities started live streaming on Xiaohongshu to sell goods, but the response was mediocre. Yang Tianzhen, the boss of Dong Jie's MCN Yijiayi, also went live on April 23, but the traffic was only 483,300. Although his celebrity effect is not as good as Dong Jie's, it also indirectly shows that there is no "head manufacturing methodology" that works all the time.

The more critical reason is that the platform does not want to copy the super anchors, especially on a decentralized platform like Xiaohongshu. How did the brand get out of the circle on Xiaohongshu? Dong Jie's product promotion is a shortcut, but with 700 products selected per show, it is not easy to be noticed by Dong Jie. Du Chengjin told "Blue Hole Business" that in addition to the positioning fit, before entering Dong Jie's product selection, they had already laid out 4,000 grass-planting notes in advance, and they were already the top three in the health tea track.

A marketing manager of a car brand told Blue Hole Business that there is a saying about "word occupancy rate" when placing ads on Xiaohongshu. "If I cooperate with 100 KOCs, there will be at least 100 notes, so the probability of randomly swiping notes related to this brand will be greatly increased." Obviously, for brands, what attracts them more on Xiaohongshu is not a certain top KOL, but the effective "planting" brought by more KOCs.

Taking Xiaohongshu notes with you when shopping has long become a habit. During the May Day holiday, the reporter visited Sanlitun in Beijing. Whether it was the luxury goods counters in the north or the gold shops in the south, the clerks would naturally tell consumers, "You can search for "Gucci Little Strawberry" on Xiaohongshu, many people are posting it", "You have good taste, this bracelet is a hot item on Xiaohongshu"...

This is what Xiaohongshu, which advocates a good community atmosphere, cares about the most, and it is also what other platforms "covet" the most.

Not long ago, Dianping.com recruited a large number of KOC experts from Xiaohongshu through its Rising Star Program; Douyin also launched Lemon8 overseas and "You Shi" domestically, trying to cross the river by following Xiaohongshu; WeChat official accounts launched a picture and text note mode, which was nicknamed "Little Green Book"... It has long been no secret that big companies are besieging Xiaohongshu. Keeping high-quality content and active user traffic pools is the basic foundation that Xiaohongshu cannot abandon.

"Xiaohongshu CMO Zhiheng expressed this to us," Du Chengjin recalled, "They believe that Xiaohongshu should still encourage high-quality notes to create long-term value. It should be more integrated into life and become Xiaohongshu that knows everything."

Finally, beyond Xiaohongshu itself, in the current live broadcast ecosystem, top streamers are a double-edged sword for the platform. The emergence of super individuals is inevitable for the development of the platform. This was the case with Taobao Live, and later with Douyin and Kuaishou, and is also the case with Xiaohongshu today.

When cultivating new shopping habits, the platform needs a head traffic to create a benchmark effect, but when the model matures, the overly strong head effect becomes a constraint. For example, Simba has publicly challenged Kuaishou many times, becoming the "love-hate" existence of the platform. Public information shows that the proportion of Kuaishou's six major families headed by Simba in the platform's GMV has dropped from 30% two years ago to 10%.

On the one hand, Dong Jie's popularity on Xiaohongshu is due to the fit between her temperament and the platform's tone, as well as the precise matching of product selection and audience; but on the other hand, it is undeniable that Xiaohongshu's strong support for live streaming e-commerce under commercial pressure has provided the fertile soil for the birth of "heads".

The brand told Blue Hole Business that Xiaohongshu regularly organizes offline communication roadshows between influencers and brands, while Douyin often holds online meet-ups. To a certain extent, this is also the reason why Xiaohongshu can still produce super-head anchors.

Not only the platform, but also for cost-effectiveness and autonomy considerations, more and more brands have begun to broadcast themselves, and MCN has also begun to "de-head", incubating more anchors in the form of company operation to share the same power. A typical example is Li Jiaqi, who was once rumored to be "retired", and began to give way to assistants more and more, and sometimes even missed the live broadcast room. The era of big anchors is gone forever.

3. Xiaohongshu is no longer shy about making money

The inability to guide users to complete closed-loop transactions within the ecosystem was once a major concern for Xiaohongshu's commercialization. According to media reports, Xiaohongshu's revenue was 80% advertising and 20% e-commerce revenue. However, this data has not been officially confirmed. The reason why e-commerce has not taken off is that consumers are used to "planting grass on Xiaohongshu and pulling grass on Tmall", which ultimately makes things easier for others.

Even the long-tail consumption after Dong Jie's products were sold out was directed to Tmall. "I bought the earrings that I didn't get in Dong Jie's live broadcast room on Tmall later," a buyer told Blue Hole Business.

"Blue Hole Business" found that many brands that have appeared in Dong Jie's live broadcast room are still the mainstream in other platforms. Take the eye makeup brand "Manye" as an example. It held 40 live broadcasts on Douyin in April; but the brand did not even open a live broadcast room on Xiaohongshu. Another home lifestyle brand Tagi held nearly 80 live broadcasts on Douyin in April, but only 10 on Xiaohongshu.

As the brand said, Douyin, as a traffic platform, still accounts for the majority of sales compared to Xiaohongshu. The live broadcasting behavior itself may naturally have a higher threshold in communities like Xiaohongshu that focus on content quality. The consumption habits that have been formed cannot be changed by Dong Jie alone.

Of course, Xiaohongshu has not bet on the top anchors. In recent times, Xiaohongshu's solution is to create more transaction entrances and carry more diverse consumer behaviors. In one month, two major actions took place.

The first is to enter the local life. According to Geek Park, Xiaohongshu has begun to recruit in-store catering merchants and service providers, and some merchants are participating in the internal test. Soon, Xiaohongshu will launch a group buying function to open up a closed loop from content seeding to transactions for local catering.

"Blue Hole Business" found that on the Xiaohongshu platform, some stores in Shanghai have opened "in-store discounts". A beverage store called YOSUPER opened a holiday yogurt coffee set meal at a group purchase price of 46 yuan. During the same period, Douyin did not launch the store's group purchase, and although Dianping had a more favorable set meal, the single product was also differentiated from Xiaohongshu.

The second is to open up "notes to bring goods". Xiaohongshu began internal testing of this new e-commerce function in mid-April. Merchants with this permission can select influencers on the platform for chain cooperation. A senior Xiaohongshu user told us, "The seamless connection of notes to bring goods is what I have been looking forward to. I don't want to plant grass and then jump to other e-commerce platforms to place orders. It's too troublesome."

After the news was released, many businesses also began to recruit influencers. Influencers can also select products through the Notes Product Selection Center. It is reported that as long as the author has more than 1,000 fans and has completed real-name authentication, they can open permissions. For Xiaohongshu, which focuses on text and pictures, notes are more logically reasonable and the path is smoother. Whether it is notes or local life, Xiaohongshu does not rely on a single large flow, but mobilizes a wider group of mid-level influencers.

It is worth noting that the link that leads to the product promotion is still the store on Xiaohongshu. This is consistent with Xiaohongshu’s previous closure of external links and the launch of the “one account and one store”. It can be seen that no matter what form or method is used, Xiaohongshu’s ultimate goal is always to guide users to complete transactions on the platform itself and realize a self-closed business loop.

Starting this year, Xiaohongshu changed its previous style of "peaceful years" and "Buddhist cash flow" and no longer hesitated to make money. The first signal was the adjustment of the organizational structure.

According to LatePost, in March this year, Xiaohongshu upgraded live streaming to an independent department. The new department head, Gintoki, is also the head of Xiaohongshu's community ecology, and is responsible for unified management of live streaming content and live streaming e-commerce business. Starting this year, Xiaohongshu COO, head of the community department, and head of commercialization technology, Conan, also began to take over the management of the commercial product team. Personnel adjustments are a microcosm of corporate business strategies. It is not difficult to see that Xiaohongshu is eager to resolve the commercialization and community disputes that have plagued it for many years.

It is worth being optimistic that this year's series of monetization measures have not been "disliked" by Xiaohongshu users, and have received a series of positive feedback. "I feel respected in Dong Jie's live broadcast room", "The era of 9.9 yuan for links is over", "Sometimes I will take the initiative to go to Xiaohongshu to find recommendations and see what others are buying"...

But the reality is that for a two-sided content platform, in order to ensure user experience while achieving smooth monetization channels, Xiaohongshu is placed on the fulcrum of a seesaw. If it leans towards content, it will become the next Douban; if it leans towards monetization, it will become tomorrow's Zhihu. As commercialization enters the deep waters, it is not easy for Xiaohongshu to maintain today's balance.

Author: Yu Weilin; Source: WeChat public account "Blue Hole Business (value_reaction)"