Produced by Radar Finance Text | Edited by Meng Shuai | Deep Sea
As the Spring Festival is getting closer, the work of major platforms in the past year has entered the final stage. However, the upcoming Spring Festival Gala has become a new "battlefield" for many platforms. After the Internet giants were stolen by the "Liquor Army" in last year's Spring Festival Gala, JD.com and Xiaohongshu became "trendy friends" in this year's Spring Festival Gala.
Among them, JD.com’s title is the exclusive interactive cooperation platform for the Spring Festival Gala. Radar Finance found that in fact, JD.com had become associated with the Spring Festival Gala as early as 2022. During the Spring Festival Gala that year, the cumulative interaction volume of Chinese people around the world participating in red envelopes on JD.com’s app reached 69.1 billion. The title of Xiaohongshu’s cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala this time is to serve as a note and live broadcast sharing platform for the Spring Festival Gala. Interestingly, Xiaohongshu focuses its cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala on the front and backstage of the Spring Festival Gala.
However, as “friends” of this year’s Spring Festival Gala, both JD.com and Xiaohongshu are currently facing certain bottlenecks. As for JD.com, its performance growth rate and market value are far behind Alibaba and Pinduoduo. While Xiaohongshu has not opened the door to the capital market for a long time, it still needs to think about how to break through in terms of commercialization and how to promote shopping. The problem of mobile e-commerce.
In fact, while the Spring Festival Gala brings laughter and joy to people across the country, it also reflects changes in social and economic development from the side. From the early watch, wine, and home appliance brands to the Internet giants in recent years, the top Spring Festival Gala’s circle of friends continues to welcome new friends. Among them, the cooperation between Tencent and the Spring Festival Gala in 2015 allowed WeChat Pay to shake Alipay's dominant position in the payment field overnight.
However, subsequent cooperation between many Internet companies and the Spring Festival Gala has found it difficult to replicate the excellent results of this year, especially the results of new acquisitions and retention achieved by spending huge sums of money have not been satisfactory. In 2023, Internet players even collectively absented themselves from the Spring Festival Gala that year. This time, JD.com and Xiaohongshu are back again as representatives of the Internet industry. They still need to face the problem of how to further retain the users attracted through the Spring Festival Gala on the platform.
JD.com returns to the stage of the Spring Festival Gala, and Xiaohongshu also comes to take a share of the pie
Nowadays, the Internet has penetrated into every aspect of people’s daily lives. When people watch the Spring Festival Gala, they not only stop at watching the program, but also participate in the Spring Festival Gala interaction and become a popular choice for many netizens on New Year’s Eve. fun.
"Big things happen on New Year's Eve." On January 24, after news broke that JD.com would cooperate with the Spring Festival Gala the day before, JD.com officially announced to the outside world the good news that it would become the exclusive interactive cooperation platform for the 2024 Spring Festival Gala. However, based on the Spring Festival Gala’s huge viewership and unimaginable influence, you need to have enough money in your pocket if you want to “make friends” with the Spring Festival Gala.
According to late reports, a person close to CCTV said that in order to become an interactive platform for the Spring Festival Gala, companies would have to spend at least hundreds of millions of yuan in sponsorship fees. Although there is currently no official information disclosing the specific cost of JD.com’s cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala, in order to prepare for the Spring Festival Gala and show its sincerity to users, JD.com has indeed spent a lot of money.
Radar Finance learned through JD.com’s public account JD.com Blackboard that JD.com has prepared many interactive gifts for this Spring Festival Gala, such as the one-year right to use a single-family mansion in Fangdian, Yangzhou worth 10 million yuan, and the property rights to a finely decorated Linhai apartment in Beidaihe. , one-year right to use 100 Lantu cars.
In addition to the aforementioned prizes, JD.com also prepared 99,999 rose bouquets, a Casarte "Twin" washing machine worth 20,000 yuan, a Jingdong supermarket shopping card worth 50,000 yuan, a Helena gift bag worth 10,000 yuan, Lenovo Tianjiao desktop worth 3,999 yuan, Gree Yunjia air conditioner worth 2,999 yuan, Zhuimi floor scrubber worth 2,499 yuan, Coocaa 100-inch TV worth 12,999 yuan, as well as 300,000 servings of milk, 1.8 million servings of stationery pens, 80 Thousands of skin care products, 100,000 annual clothing gifts...
Radar Finance found that JD.com is not actually a new friend of the Spring Festival Gala. As early as the CCTV Spring Festival Gala in 2022, JD.com became the exclusive interactive partner of the Spring Festival Gala. According to data disclosed by JD.com, during the Spring Festival Gala that year, the cumulative interaction of Chinese people around the world with red envelopes on the JD.com app reached 69.1 billion, and many netizens participated in sharing 1.5 billion red envelopes and goodies.
faces hundreds of millions of participants on the Spring Festival Gala. As an interactive platform, it obviously requires strong technical and computing power support. For the 2022 Spring Festival Gala, JD.com only has 19 days to prepare, and JD.com even called it “the shortest technical preparation time for the Spring Festival Gala in history.” During the
party, JD Cloud's hybrid multi-cloud operating system Cloud Ship successfully challenged the world's largest traffic peak. Without increasing computing resources, based on more than 70 data centers across the country, it used the world's leading nearly 3 million containers and ultra-large 10 million computing power resources, through extremely fast resource scheduling at the second level, successfully climbed to the top of the "Mount Everest" in the field of cloud computing with ultra-high elasticity.
In order to provide consumers with a better experience during this period, JD.com also needs to provide adequate protection in terms of logistics and customer service. During the 2022 Chinese New Year, more than 200,000 JD logistics guys will be on duty overnight to fully ensure the New Year shopping needs of consumers in more than 300 cities and nearly 1,500 districts and counties across the country. At the same time, there are nearly 10,000 JD customer service personnel on the front line to provide services to consumers during the festival.
However, JD.com’s purpose of spending huge sums of money to ride the Spring Festival Gala is obviously not for public welfare. Its real purpose is to promote the platform, increase the number of users, increase user activity, and promote the platform to complete more transactions. . Facts have proved that as the top streamer during the Spring Festival, the traffic-draining ability of the Spring Festival Gala cannot be underestimated.
During the 2022 Spring Festival Gala, the 2022 CCTV Spring Festival Gala masks exclusively sponsored by Henan Tuoren Group were put on sale simultaneously on JD.com that night. From the start of the Spring Festival Gala to 24:00, the number of users who searched for "Spring Festival Gala masks" on JD.com exceeded 720,000 times .
During the Spring Festival Gala that year, "Spring Festival Gala style", sweatshirts for the Year of the Tiger, CCTV golden bowls, lipsticks, cat belly pillows, smart door locks, etc. became hot search keywords in the fashion home category. Among them, smart door locks increased 32 times compared with the same period last year during the Spring Festival, red sweatshirts with zodiac signs increased more than 10 times, and the overall category of gold jewelry increased more than 7 times. Gold with zodiac signs in the Year of the Tiger has become an absolute best-seller.
While the "rich" JD.com once again became a "trendy friend" of the Spring Festival Gala, this year's Spring Festival Gala also welcomed another new friend - Xiaohongshu. On January 19, Xiaohongshu announced on its official public account that it has officially become a platform for sharing notes and live broadcasts of the Spring Festival Gala.
According to Xiaohongshu, on New Year’s Eve, Xiaohongshu will create a companion live broadcast of “Everyone’s Spring Festival Gala”. However, Radar Finance learned that "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala" is not a live broadcast of the Spring Festival Gala on Xiaohongshu, but an exclusive live broadcast room set up next to the Spring Festival Gala studio. This live broadcast will allow users to participate in the Spring Festival Gala immersively. In front of and behind the scenes.
Xiaohongshu has become another highlight of the Spring Festival Gala notes and live broadcast sharing platform. It is a good thing to plant on the Spring Festival Gala stage. Netizens can also buy it simultaneously on Xiaohongshu. After the Spring Festival Gala, Xiaohongshu will also launch a series of activities "Everyone's Spring Festival", and continue to capture the traffic of the Spring Festival through various hot New Year games online and offline.
Behind making friends with the Spring Festival Gala, JD.com’s Xiaohongshu can’t hide its anxiety.
Whether it’s JD.com, which has already appeared on the Spring Festival Gala before, or Xiaohongshu, which has found a new angle to enter into commercial cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala, the first two Internet companies Everyone has their own worries now.
As far as JD.com is concerned, its position as the “number two” in the e-commerce field has become no longer stable. In the third quarter of last year, the growth rate of JD.com’s performance data was at a disadvantage compared to Alibaba and Pinduoduo. During the reporting period, JD.com’s revenue of 247.7 billion yuan only achieved less than 2% year-on-year growth. Among them, JD Retail contributed 212.06 billion yuan in revenue to JD.com in the quarter, and its growth almost stagnated compared to the same period last year.
In this quarter, JD.com’s core electronic products and household appliances contributed 119.32 billion yuan in revenue, which was not a significant increase compared with the same period last year. At the same time, JD.com’s daily necessities revenue even declined year-on-year, from 77.74 billion yuan in the same period last year to 75.99 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 2.3%.
As for JD.com’s performance in terms of market capitalization, there is a growing gap between the former two.As of the close of trading on February 6, Eastern Time, JD.com's market value was US$37.937 billion, while the market values of Alibaba and Pinduoduo were US$195.575 billion and US$167.11 billion respectively, which is equivalent to 5.2 times and 4.4 times that of JD.com. In addition, JD.com is also lagging behind in seeking new growth points overseas.
According to late reports, this year’s Spring Festival Gala, JD.com will link up all its businesses to carry out lottery interactions. Jingxi app, which focuses on the sinking market, will also participate, and the scope of interaction will even reach overseas. The above-mentioned actions are enough to show that JD.com intends to tap more sinking traffic through this Spring Festival Gala and further expand overseas markets.
It is worth mentioning that during the 2022 Spring Festival Gala, Jingxi app under JD.com simultaneously launched the "Spring Festival Shake to Share 300 Million Red Envelopes" campaign. According to data disclosed by JD.com, the aforementioned activities attracted more than 32.27 million people to participate, and more than 158 million coupons were issued at the same time.
As for Xiaohongshu, although there have been many reports in the market in recent years that it will go to the capital market, until now Xiaohongshu has not fulfilled the dream of its founders Mao Wenchao and Qu Fang to go public. Even Xiaohongshu has not been in the market Valuations have also shrunk. At the same time, Xiaohongshu, which has not been in the capital market for a long time, also faces many thorny problems in its commercialization process.
According to Lei Feng.com, Xiaohongshu’s daily active users exceeded 100 million in early 2023, but the goal of 140 million daily active users in 2023 has not been achieved. Relying too much on advertising revenue will inevitably make Xiaohongshu’s business model appear less “sexy” and make it more difficult to mobilize capital enthusiasm; and being too commercial may also affect the community atmosphere of the platform. The question of how to weigh the balance between community and commercialization is undoubtedly still troubling Xiaohongshu.
In fact, the e-commerce business that Xiaohongshu has been involved in since the company was founded is still in the exploratory stage. Whether compared with established e-commerce players such as Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo, or compared with e-commerce newcomers such as Douyin and Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu’s progress and scale in the e-commerce field are relatively lagging behind.
According to Internet analyst Ding Daoshi, the differentiated marketing adopted by Xiaohongshu for this Spring Festival Gala is mainly determined based on the characteristics of Xiaohongshu’s products. Ding Daoshi further pointed out that Xiaohongshu cooperated with the Spring Festival Gala based on its own platform advantages. Xiaohongshu’s grass-growing model is highly social and suitable for interactive marketing during the Spring Festival Gala. Moreover, Xiaohongshu is currently vigorously developing e-commerce. It is logical to use live streaming as the foothold of Spring Festival Gala marketing this time.
Some market participants believe that at a time when the traffic dividend in the Internet industry has peaked, JD.com and Xiaohongshu hope to attract new users to the platform by capturing the traffic of the Spring Festival Gala. However, since the bonus effect brought by the Spring Festival Gala to enterprises is more biased towards attracting new users, how to retain the attracted users still needs to test the platform's own strength and later operations.
The Spring Festival Gala is not a panacea for major Internet companies
Since the birth of the first Spring Festival Gala in 1983, the Spring Festival Gala has now gone through more than 40 years. Looking back at the past dozens of Spring Festival Galas, the Spring Festival Gala has witnessed that people across the country are getting better and better. At the same time, the cooperation contained in its huge commercial value also reflects the changes in the economy of the times to a certain extent.
In the past few decades, the sponsors of the Spring Festival Gala have evolved from the original watch and bicycle manufacturers to fine wine and home appliance giants, and then to the joining of epoch-making Internet manufacturers... The list of business partners that have cooperated with the Spring Festival Gala has become more and more luxurious. , the fields are getting wider and wider, and the intensity of spreading money is getting stronger and stronger.
Especially in recent years, the rise of Internet giants relying on social networking, payment, e-commerce, short video and other businesses have become a unique landscape on the Spring Festival Gala. In 2015, Tencent became the first Internet giant to reap the benefits of the Spring Festival Gala.
Back then, relying on its cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala, WeChat Pay successfully "sneak-attacked" Alipay. Alipay's foundation has been shaken overnight after years of hard work in the payment field. Even Jack Ma expressed emotion, "This Spring Festival 'Pearl Harbor attack' was indeed perfectly planned and executed" and "it really taught us a profound lesson."
According to WeChat’s official disclosure data, the total number of WeChat red envelopes sent and received on New Year’s Eve reached 1.01 billion, the total number of WeChat shake interactions during the Spring Festival Gala reached 11 billion, and the peak interaction reached 810 million times per minute. Before the Spring Festival Gala, WeChat had less than 8 million WeChat Pay users. After its debut on the Spring Festival Gala stage, the number of personal bank cards bound to the WeChat platform reached 200 million in just two days. As of May 2015, the number of WeChat Change users reached 300 million.
After this battle, Tencent has tasted a lot of benefits, but Ali, who failed to catch up with the Spring Festival Gala and was "sneakly attacked", is greedy for it. So, over the next three years, Ali decided to take the initiative. According to media reports, the naming fee paid by Alibaba as the exclusive partner of CCTV Spring Festival Gala in 2016 increased five times compared with the previous year. The "Collecting Five Blessings" activity that debuted on the Spring Festival Gala has now become one of the "New Year customs" in the Internet era.
Since then, Internet manufacturers such as Baidu, Kuaishou, Douyin, and JD.com have taken turns becoming the “financiers” of the Spring Festival Gala. Although latecomers have gained to varying degrees through cooperation with the Spring Festival Gala, there is still a gap compared with the business miracle of WeChat Pay that year. Internet giants are spending huge sums of money to bet on the Spring Festival Gala. However, the actual conversion and retention effects brought about by this commercial cooperation are difficult to reproduce the glory of WeChat Pay in the past.
For example, during the 2016 Spring Festival Gala, Alipay DAU reached 270 million, and then fell rapidly. According to statistics from Renren’s product manager, Alipay’s daily activity fell back to 110 million on June 18 of the same year. A similar plot happened again in 2017. During the Spring Festival Gala that year, Alipay dau reached 378 million, but by June 18 of the same year, this figure dropped again to 149 million.
According to data from market research company QuestMobile, on New Year’s Eve 2019, driven by the CCTV Spring Festival Gala red envelope sponsorship, Baidu app’s DAU reached 240 million, a year-on-year increase of 67.3%. However, according to statistics from Guojin Securities, after New Year’s Eve, the Baidu app’s new user retention rate within 7 days was only 2%.
In the first quarter of 2019, Baidu’s net loss reached 330 million yuan, which was Baidu’s first quarterly loss since its listing in 2005. According to the financial report released by Baidu, in the first quarter including the Spring Festival, Baidu's sales and marketing expenses increased by 93% year-on-year to 6.054 billion yuan, which greatly affected the company's profit performance. Yu Zhengjun, Baidu's chief financial officer at the time, also said after the financial report was released that the company's losses in the first quarter were affected by the CCTV New Year's Eve party marketing activities.
Coupled with the overall setbacks in the Internet industry in recent years, the amount of Spring Festival red envelopes issued by Internet giants has also continued to shrink. Some media reported that the total amount of online red envelopes officially announced by major manufacturers dropped from 12.2 billion yuan in 2021 to 8 billion yuan in 2022, and by 2023 it would only be 4.3 billion yuan.
By 2023, Internet giants will even become "invisible" collectively. This year, the "liquor army" composed of Wuliangye, Mengzhilan and other brands has gained a strong sense of presence. Although this year's Spring Festival Gala still has major Internet companies cooperating with the Spring Festival Gala in terms of content, the former does not have the same high-profile sponsorship as in previous years.
Although Internet giants were absent from last year’s Spring Festival Gala, the traffic generated by the Spring Festival Gala was still coveted by many “funders”. Data shows that in the 2023 Spring Festival Gala, the number of new media live broadcast users reached 655 million, an increase of 47.7% compared to the previous year's live broadcast, and the cumulative number of viewers of the vertical screen Spring Festival Gala reached 179 million, an increase of more than 50% compared to the previous year.
As the 2024 Spring Festival Gala is about to begin, the Internet team once again sent JD.com, which has previously cooperated with the Spring Festival Gala, and Xiaohongshu, which has recently cooperated with the Spring Festival Gala, to compete. However, some analysts pointed out that it is difficult to come up with new ideas in the Spring Festival Gala marketing activities, but the rules are becoming more and more complex. In addition, the rewards received by most users for actual participation are not as "excessive" as advertised. The Spring Festival Gala How much of the increment brought to Internet giants can ultimately be retained may not be as optimistic as imagined.
