cover news reporter Meng Mei
It has been a few days since the Spring Festival Gala ended. Looking at this year's Spring Festival Gala, whether it is the familiar traditional famous wines that have come to an end one after another, or the appearance of domestic mobile phones and cars represented by Huawei, the intention of the propaganda to stimulate consumption has been very obvious.
The Economic Work Conference at the end of 2023 directly stated: It is necessary to stimulate potential consumption, expand profitable investment, and form a virtuous cycle in which consumption and investment promote each other. At the beginning of 2024, senior officials clearly designated 2024 as a "consumption promotion year." The above not only provides a direction for further expanding domestic demand, but also provides a direction for promoting the value of public opinion during the Spring Festival Gala.
In addition to the traditional consumer platform manufacturers dominating the list, "Internet +" also continues to carry the banner of economic transformation. As early as the end of January 2024, there was overwhelming news that two major Internet companies, JD.com and Xiaohongshu, would sponsor the Spring Festival Gala. In particular, Xiaohongshu’s live broadcast of grass planting and JD.com’s “One penny take away physical gifts”, 3 billion red envelopes, and “big money” lottery to give away 100 cars and other activities have shaken up the market.
Take Xiaohongshu as an example. After breaking through the 100 million daily active mark, it also fell into a bottleneck period. The reason why we chose to bring funds to the Spring Festival Gala is simply to try to tap sinking traffic and break through the growth dilemma. Especially for Xiaohongshu, it is a top priority to break through the traffic growth dilemma and promote its newly established buyer e-commerce business. In the "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala" live broadcast room, Xiaohongshu began to sell the same Spring Festival Gala clothing and peripherals. Data released by Xiaohongshu shows that on New Year’s Eve, the number of Spring Festival Gala-related notes posted exceeded 1.56 million. During the event from January 19 to February 10, there were more than 80 million users searching for content related to the Spring Festival Gala in the Xiaohongshu community, and more than 25 million users participated in posting notes and writing comments. Obviously, Xiaohongshu attracted a lot of attention in this national party.
At the "Xiaohongshu will Business Conference" on December 22, 2023, Xiaohongshu "opened up the ecosystem" for the first time. It not only allows "off-site traffic diversion", but also connects cross-platform data, sending an "open door" signal to all merchants and platforms. This move also means that Xiaohongshu is no longer trapped in the quagmire of community atmosphere and commercialization in terms of commercialization, and its strategy is also clearer. Before the "opening up", Xiaohongshu's drastic reforms were also implemented one after another, including live e-commerce, note-taking, and local life. After cutting off self-operated welfare societies, it quickly established a closed loop for on-site transactions.
It seems that the road to commercialization of Xiaohongshu is beginning to become clear. At the very least, opening up data and opening up search traffic may stimulate merchants and platforms to increase investment and form a more active ecosystem than today. But opening up the ecology means introducing more partners, and it also means a long-term game of resource pulling and dominance. The most important problem is that once Xiaohongshu becomes a traffic platform, if it cannot take the initiative, it will easily be "taken away" by the e-commerce platform.
In fact, not only Xiaohongshu, communities that value authenticity and interactivity have always had irreconcilable conflicts with businesses that value efficiency and transformation. The swing between the two is also the commercialization of all communities such as Zhihu and Bilibili. common problem.
The Spring Festival Gala added fuel to the commercialization process of Xiaohongshu. In the future, when thousands of merchants and brands pour in and commercialization continues to accelerate, the fragile balance among the three will often be gradually broken, and it is still unclear who will have the upper hand.
