A few days ago, a source revealed that Xiaohongshu has recently undergone high-level personnel changes and ushered in a new person in charge of community content. It is said that the person in charge is named Jiang Yuan (pseudonym: Yunfan), who previously worked for another platform and has many years of experience in community operation and commercialization. As the successor to the former head of community content, Xie Yunwei (nickname: Kappa), will serve in the content operation department of Xiaohongshu, be responsible for all content in the community, and report directly to Mao Wenchao (nickname: Seiya), founder and CEO of Xiaohongshu.
For a content community like Xiaohongshu, the replacement of the head of community content is obviously a significant event. And the "parachuting" of newcomers often means that a company's previous "experience" cannot solve the problem, and it needs to seek answers from outside. So for Xiaohongshu, what are the problems it is facing at the moment?
In fact, at the end of 2023, it was previously reported that Kappa was leaving the company, citing the reason for his departure was "weak and unsatisfactory community growth." Although there has been no official response to this so far, judging from the relevant data, the growth of Xiaohongshu users in 2023 is indeed a little weak.
According to the relevant data released by QuestMobile, the average monthly DAU size of Xiaohongshu in January 2023 was 68.38 million, and in December 2023, it reached 92.62 million.
While community growth is slowing, Xiaohongshu's commercialization has entered a new stage. It can be seen that under the pressure of making money to support the family, in 2023, Xiaohongshu will not only clarify the model of "buyer e-commerce" for the e-commerce business, but also launch a "1+3" open product matrix at the advertising business level, including the data alliance "Grass Planting", as well as the upgraded version of Lingxi, Grass Global Access and Search Direct three products/solutions, opening up data and trying to change grass planting from "metaphysics" to "science". In addition, in the local life service track where large factories are flooding, Xiaohongshu has also begun to make efforts.
Under this series of moves, the relevant report of the Financial Times at the beginning of this year showed that Xiaohongshu's revenue will reach $3.7 billion in 2023, and it will be profitable for the first time, with a net profit of $500 million. That compares to a $2 billion revenue and a $200 million loss in 2022.
And some sources revealed that the commercialization of Xiaohongshu will be further accelerated in 2024. Taking the advertising business as an example, it is said that Xiaohongshu's ADS (ad load rate) will be 10% in 2023, and its goal in 2024 is to increase it by another 2 percentage points to 12%.
After entering 2024, Xiaohongshu has also carried out a series of personnel and organizational structure adjustments. For example, Wu Yingbing, the former head of Didi's supply and demand strategy, Zhang Rui, the former head of Didi's hitchhiking business, and Ye Heng, the former head of Kuaishou's original e-commerce product, have joined the company, as well as the addition of positions such as the head of commercialization in the Internet industry.
It can be said that it is almost no secret that Xiaohongshu is accelerating commercialization, whether it is from the adjustment of business strategic direction, or the change of organizational structure and personnel. Combined with the slowdown in community growth and the acceleration of commercialization, it is not difficult to find that Xiaohongshu is now facing the dilemma of traffic being taken away by e-commerce business and the community atmosphere being diluted by advertising.
After all, once the frequency of e-commerce and advertising content is too high, it may affect the user's experience. You must know that the value of Xiaohongshu's content ecology and the attributes of its grass planting platform all come from the creator's sharing based on real experience.
What's more, while giving creators more opportunities to monetize, it may also induce them to pursue excessive commercial interests, and then neglect the quality and originality of content creation, and then criticize and comment in order to eliminate opposition. There is a view that in the comment area of some promotional content on Xiaohongshu, it is difficult to find the comments of real users, and they are replaced by repeated and templated comments left by the water army, which undoubtedly seriously undermines the atmosphere of the community and the authenticity of the content.
It can be said that if Xiaohongshu wants to achieve more revenue and user growth at the same time, it obviously needs to be supported by a larger content ecology and more refined operations, and to achieve a balance between content ecology, community atmosphere, and commercialization. And looking back now, it is not difficult to find that Xiaohongshu never seems to have really achieved a balance between the three in the past.
In the past decade, one of the most important reasons why Xiaohongshu has been able to achieve success in terms of content ecology and community atmosphere is its restraint and caution in commercialization. It can even be said that in the past, Xiaohongshu was sacrificing commercialization in exchange for the development of community ecology to a certain extent. Against this background, it is difficult to say that the appointment of the new head has nothing to do with it. Moreover, some relevant sources revealed that focusing on vertical fields such as games and knowledge will be one of Xiaohongshu's countermeasures.
However, it should be noted that the problems faced by Xiaohongshu today are actually inevitable challenges in the commercialization process of almost all content communities. Especially in today's era when almost every platform has to deploy content, creators and high-quality content can be described as strategic resources. Even though Douyin, which has a lot of traffic and e-commerce business development is in full swing, it is still carefully balancing content ecology and commercialization, and is constantly trying to expand the content form and enrich the content ecology to avoid bringing a sense of redundancy to the platform.
Although the development of large models and generative artificial intelligence can lower the threshold for creation and improve efficiency, it also brings hidden dangers of AI manuscript washing and traffic fraud. For this kind of creators, they often don't pursue a hit, or even a certain one to become a hit, because they only need to "pile up" the number of reads with the number of posts to be successful.
Furthermore, in addition to the constraints of the content ecosystem, there are still many problems to be solved in the commercialization of Xiaohongshu, such as the e-commerce business is still trapped in the "niche", and the local life service business has not yet taken off. All in all, after achieving profitability, Xiaohongshu may not have become easier, but still needs to go all out.
[The picture in this article comes from the Internet]