In a groundbreaking development for China’s digital landscape, Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) is emerging as a dominant force in the search engine market.

QuestMobile’s recent report reveals that the platform’s daily search volume has reached an impressive six billion queries in Q4 2024—doubling from three billion in mid-2023. This figure now places Xiaohongshu at nearly half the daily search volume of Badfidu, China’s long-standing search giant.

A New Era in Search Dominance

Industry insiders confirm that Xiaohongshu’s meteoric rise has come at the expense of Baidu’s market share. With Baidu’s daily search volume hovering just above ten billion, Xiaohongshu’s continued growth trajectory suggests it could soon surpass Baidu as China’s most-used search engine. Experts speculate that Baidu relinquishing its top spot is not a matter of if but when.

Xiaohongshu’s surge isn’t accidental. The platform has aggressively recruited top-tier search talent from Baidu. A source rev...

In an unexpected yet strategic move, WeChat has been quietly introducing a new content feature, closely resembling the popular Chinese lifestyle platform, Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book).

Through subtle UI adjustments, primarily using red dot notifications, WeChat has begun channeling users into a dual-column, image-text format that feels strikingly similar to Xiaohongshu’s interface.

This development, which is currently undergoing grey testing, indicates a shift in Tencent’s broader strategy to diversify its content offerings and tap into new audience segments.

For many users, clicking on the familiar notification initially leads them to articles shared by friends but increasingly reroutes them to a dual-column layout showcasing various content types, from videos to trending topics.

This deliberate yet understated change hints at WeChat’s ambition to capture the growing market for social-driven, lifestyle content—a space where Xiaohongshu has excelled. By leverag...

Recently, many brands selling adult toys and lingerie have ventured into live streaming on platforms like Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book or RED), with a notable increase in female-oriented products. These live streams, much like those for beauty and fashion, are brightly lit and tastefully designed, with hosts discussing various products as if they were ordinary household items.

These sexual wellness products often have playful names like “rabbit” or “seal,” and discussions replace anatomical terms with euphemisms. If one doesn't listen closely, it might be hard to identify these products as sexual wellness items at first glance.

A Changing Landscape for Sexual Wellness Products

Historically, marketing sexual wellness products on short video platforms was strictly prohibited. Late last year, Douyin (China's TikTok) allowed adult product categories on its e-commerce platform but limited them to shelf listings without live streaming privileges.

This year, several e-commer...

The landscape of China's mobile internet usage, as detailed by QuestMobile's data, reveals nuanced behaviors and shifting trends among users.

The insights cover various facets of digital interaction, including changes in user engagement, the resurgence of cultural and tourism activities, and the evolution of consumer consumption patterns towards more rational and health-conscious decisions.

Adjusting Digital Engagement

There's a slight decrease in the stickiness of user engagement with the internet, marking an 11.4-hour reduction in monthly average usage time. This shift suggests users are becoming more selective in their online activities, possibly seeking more meaningful content or balancing digital interaction with offline experiences.

Cultural and Tourism Activities as Consumer Boosters

The data highlights a significant trend towards increased engagement in cultural and tourism-related scenarios.

Segments such as movie performances, train services, car serv...

In recent years, China has seen the rise of a new social phenomenon known as "Dazi" socializing, a term that encapsulates the idea of forming temporary, activity-based companionships.

This trend, which spans across a variety of activities such as dining, fitness, and travel, is a reflection of the changing dynamics in how young Chinese people engage with each other in an increasingly digital and mobile world.

The Appeal of "Dazi" Socializing

The allure of "Dazi" socializing lies in its simplicity and practicality. Unlike traditional, more entangled forms of socializing that often lead to complex interpersonal relationships, "Dazi" offers a straightforward, no-strings-attached type of interaction.

It respects the privacy of individuals and avoids emotional entanglements, allowing participants to engage in shared activities while maintaining their personal boundaries.

This form of socializing is particularly attractive in the modern context, where young people are ...

It's hard to pinpoint when it started, but major Chinese tech companies have become obsessed with "planting grass" (Zhongcao).

"Planting grass", or Zhongcao, refers to recommending quality products to others to entice purchases or generating a desire to experience or possess something based on external information.

In recent years, internet giants such as Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Meituan have been entering the "planting grass" race, focusing on the grass-planting economy.

Nearly 20 grass-planting products have been launched by these companies in the past two years, and some have even rolled out similar products overseas. However, most of these products have fizzled out, turning "planting grass" into a lingering concern for these tech giants.

At its core, the "grass-planting economy" is an attention economy, a further extension of the "internet celebrity economy". According to public reports, the grass-planting economy has already reached a scale of hundreds of billi...

Last year, WeChat launched WeStore, an online store mini program on WeChat. Many companies launched their WeChat stores, including luxury brands. Recently, some users found some luxury brands' WeChat mini programs, such as Gucci and Givenchy, inside JD and Xiaohongshu (RED).

Gucci's Xiaohongshu Company Account shown in search results

Clicking on the ad (the "cat" image) sends users to WeChat for authorization; once acknowledged, it sends the user back to Gucci's WeChat Mini Program home page, integrated on Xiaohongshu platform:

Gucci's WeChat Mini Program home page

French luxury brands YSL and Givenchy have also participated in the test for mini program integration. The test is now limited to very few merchants according to Xiaohongshu.

Xiaohongshu Company Account is an upgraded version of brand account.

In April 2019, Xia...

Each of the biggest influencer community platforms, including Weibo, Douyin (TikTok's Chinese version), Kuaishou (Kwai's Chinese version), and Xiaohongshu, has its own characteristics and features, which also come from the differences in terms of KOL follower bases.
Top 10,000 KOLs by Total Followers
Weibo: after years of operation and user retention, all of the Top 10,000 KOL accounts have over one million followers, among which 91% have between 1 million and 10 million followers according to data from Top Kout.

TikTok: though it’s only been live for a bit over 3 years, KOLs on TikTok are acquiring new followers at a very fast rate, thanks to the platform’s algorithm. There are over 6,000 KOLs with over 1 million followers.

Kuaishou: KOLs need to build good relationships with their followers, and followers tend to interact with KOLs who have closer relationships with them. It takes time to acquire new followers so the growth rate is relatively steady.

59% of the total KOLs ...

China's mass local brands are gaining shelf share of Alibaba's Tmall platform while the visibility for western brands is increasingly challenging. Chinese color cosmetic brands now account for 55% of top 10 default search results and 65% of sales-sorted search results, up 14% and 11% YoY respectively, according to a Gartner report.

The report shows Tmall marketing activations are key for driving traffic and brand awareness on the platform. Featured by nearly 40% of analyzed brands, Tmall Super Brand Day and Tmall Hey Box are the most commonly promoted by brands on Chinese social platform Weibo.

Singer-turned-entrepreneur Victoria Beckham is launching her eponymous beauty line on Alibaba Group’s cross-border e-commerce platform Tmall Global this week, marking the brand’s first foray into the China market.

Tmall is China’s leading online commerce destination for beauty brands.

The Gartner report suggests brands should:

optimize product descriptions and target paid me...

WeChat Pay transactions for the tourism industry increased by 43% year-on-year during the recent 3-day Dragon Boat Festival holiday, and the payment amount increased by 27% year-on-year, according to a joint report by WeChat and LY.com.

The short-haul getaway trips are the top options for many; the transactions on WeChat Mini Programs increased by 123.52% YoY.

In response to the call for epidemic prevention and control, many scenic spots have moved their services from offline to online. During the Dragon Boat Festival, the scenic spots provide services such as travel booking through the WeChat Official Account (OA) and Mini Program (MP).

The number of transactions on WeChat OA grew by 38.54% YoY and that on MP increased by 123.52% YoY. Guangzhou Changlong, Beijing Happy Valley, and Shanghai Disneyland have become the top three that saw most WeChat Pay transactions during this holiday.

Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hangzhou have become the top 3 popular tourist destinations in C...

The four mobile social platforms favored by brands in China to plant a seed in consumers' minds driving brand awareness and sales are no doubt TikTok (Douyin app), Kuaishou (Kwai), Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu (RED).

Take a quick overview of the four apps on time usage, user growth, and their downstream shopping platforms (Taobao, Pinduoduo, JD, Taojiji, Vipshop).

TikTok's monthly active users increased to 518 million in March 2020, an increase of 14.7% YoY. Kuaishou and Bilibili both experienced over 30% YoY growth.

All four platforms saw high growth in monthly usage time:

Taobao and Pinduoduo benefit most from the four social platforms in March 2020.

Check out TikTok users profile here....

Boundaries for content creators in China are disappearing. Their means of creation and background are diversifying. Thanks to the lowered barrier for distribution, now everyone can be a content creator, making the content area more diverse and colorful. On Douyin, fashion, relationship, food, and talent show categories are witnessing saturation; still opportunities in the field of culture, travel, health, and tech categories.

Firstly, the boundaries of means of creation are disappearing. Both supply and demand for short videos are increasing.

Short videos had been increasingly popular in 2019.

According to data from CNNIC, average time spent on short videos by users had been constantly growing during the first half of 2019.

According to Xinbang’s survey, compared to time spent on text, image, comic books, live streaming, and audio, time spent on short videos has shown significant growth.

In addition, the percentage of content creators working in text and image creation i...

In terms of overall trends, beauty makeup, travel, fashion, cultural entertainment, and gourmet food rank among the top five in the content ecology of Xiaohongshu’s (a.k.a. Little Red Book) community.

Education, photography, sporting events, technology & digital and home furnishing are among the top five rising categories according to a report from Xiaohongshu. Further, Xiaohongshu, who has been promoting short videos this year, has also disclosed the total duration of the Top 100 videos – about 1,204 years.

The post-95 generation has become the group that publishes the most Beauty & Makeup contents among all ages groups.

In 2019, Xiaohongshu witnessed the output of a variety of makeup content that triggered trends. Many popular makeups were shared first in Xiaohongshu before their widespread, which once again verified Xiaohongshu's ability to drive popular and trending topics.

In the fashion sector, the report shows that men are more inclined to publish fashion...

Xiaohongshu, also known as RED or Little Red Book, has been preparing its Business Account live streaming function for almost a month. It is officially announced that Xiaohongshu will provide quality brand partners and the campaign-based partnership project with access to its Business Account live streaming platform.

Xiaohongshu explains that brand representatives, professional sales guides, and quality KOCs can live stream to followers directly through its Business Account platform.

At the same time, it will allow direct interactive live streaming between brands and KOLs, in order to help brand owners overcome the barriers between online and offline, as well as to get closer to their customers.

Last year, Taobao, Kuaishou, and TikTok all started and witnessed successful live streaming performances. Now since the official announcement, many sellers on Xiaohongshu are very eager to try out the new function, in the hope that it can generate significant traffic.

There are many...

Xiaohongshu's original product form in mid-2013 was "US Shopping Guide", which was in PDF format. Xiaohongshu entered the market from the angle of overseas shopping and successfully captured a group of urban young women who are pursuing an exquisite lifestyle.

Alternatively, you can read the eBook: Xiaohongshu Growth & Product Strategies
All the good products in the world
In 2013, overseas shopping had already become a trend, with nearly 100 million Chinese starting to travel abroad. Xiaohongshu, after research, found that the expenses of air tickets, hotels, and other expenses in the outbound travel accounted for only a small portion, and the real and bigger portion was on shopping overseas.

At that time, there was no good product on the market to inform users on how to buy things overseas, and that became the starting point of Xiaohongshu.

At the end of 2013, Xiaohongshu's first mobile app launched was the “Guide to Shopping in Hong Kong”, which marked the start of it...

Following the increasing cost of acquiring new users, platforms strive to keep them engaged and increase repeat usage. Taking the popular social platform Xiaohongshu as an example, it took 1,644 days to hit 100 million users from December 05, 2013 to June 06, 2018. As of January 2019, its registered users has exceeded 200 million.

Its monthly active users reached 85 million according to an internal memo leaked in June 2019.

Let’s take a look at Xiaohongshu’s strategies of obtaining young users based on information from Xueliang Zhan who is in charge of Xiaohongshu technology.
Losing users under 18 years of age
How to find a balance between the increasing cost of acquiring new users and ensured revenue growth? User retention might be the key. Across different age groups, users younger than 18 years old are the most likely to leave Xiaohongshu.

It seems reasonable to assume that those users might only have chances to use Xiaohongshu on weekends since most of them are at s...

Social e-commerce is a segment that involves utilizing communication channels such as social networking websites, SNS, WeChat, Weibo, social media as well as the social interaction, user-generated content and other measures to facilitate the purchase and sales of products. Social networking elements as “like”, sharing, connection, discussion, interaction, and others are applied to the process of e-commerce transactions. Let's take a look at the three popular business models of social e-commerce in China.

Related Dossier: Social e-commerce
1. Social Content E-commerce
This model is the e-commerce model that can be applicable to all products, most worthy of deep exploration. Transactions are driven by content as the audience, based on common interests and hobbies, form a community and attract massive visits by users and fans with high-quality content.

Users can be attracted to consumption through the production of content via social media tools (WeChat, Weibo, live broadcast, sho...

Besides Tmall Global and JD Worldwide, Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book, a.k.a. RED) and Netease Kaola are also leading platforms in China's cross-border e-commerce market. Let's take a look at a quick comparison of users on these two platforms including the demographic profile and geographic distributions.

Xiaohongshu is way ahead of Netease Kaola in terms of user growth after it reached the 100-million-user milestone in May 2018. It maintained double-digit growth rate in the second half of 2018, between 20%-30% except December. Xiaohongshu consists of mainly female users, accounting for 82.6%, while Kaola's female users ratio is 71.2% according to data from MobData.

Over half of Xiaohongshu users are 24 y-o and younger (53.5%), comparing with Kaola's 34.8% in this age group. Kaola's 25-34 y-o group accounts for 46% of all users.

Xiaohongshu users have a preference for music while Kaola's users prefer to finance management. Huawei is the top smartphone brand used by Kaola...

During the night of May 11, WeChat "quietly" made a major update to the "Goodies Circle", which was praised by the industry as the "shopping version of Moments".

Within the "Search" entrance of Wechat appeared a new first-tier entrance of "Goodies Circle". In addition, a new function of "New Circle & Group" has been added to the Moments. The good things recommended by users in WeChat Mini Programs mall will be directly displayed in the "Goodies Circle", forming a commodity flow similar to the Moments.

While other friends in the user's Moments, when accessing the Goodies Circle, may be double enticed because of the buyer's show and the endorsement of acquaintances.

For example, when a user browses the products recommended by a friend in a Goodies Circle, he can see the picture of the products and the store name, and when he clicks on the details, he will be redirected to the Mini Program of the products. In the Mini Program, the user can make purchase and payment d...

China's social e-commerce platform Xiaohongshu, or RED, is testing a new social e-commerce product Xiaohongdian, based on two key components of WeChat's ecosystem: Moments for sharing and Mini-Programs as the infrastructure. For now, users can only get access from sharing within WeChat.

Xiaohongdian’s priority is to attract new users for the community and improve the conversion rate.

Xiaohongshu (literally 'Little Red Book'), also known as RED, is a leading social media and e-commerce platform in China with 200 million registered users. It has been working on its social e-commerce platform for some time and trying to incubate products, according to a report from 36Kr. Currently, there are only 11 SKUs for online celebrity-approved snacks, such as Samyang Hot Chicken.

It is for the consideration that snacks are affordable in prices and of great potential to be bestsellers. All products are supplied by brands working with Xiaohongshu community. They haven't decided products...