Cover News Reporter Meng Mei.
It's been a few days since the Spring Festival Gala ended. Looking at the big party of this year's Spring Festival Gala, whether it is the well-known traditional famous wines in turn, or the appearance of domestic mobile phones and cars represented by Huawei, the intention of shouting to stimulate consumption has been very obvious.
The economic work conference at the end of 2023 directly stated that it is necessary to stimulate potential consumption, expand profitable investment, and form a virtuous circle in which consumption and investment promote each other. At the beginning of 2024, the senior management has clearly identified 2024 as the "Year of Consumption Promotion". The above not only provides a direction for further expanding domestic demand, but also provides a direction for the best value promotion of 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. The news that JD.com and Xiaohongshu, two major Internet companies, will sponsor the Spring Festival Gala as early as the end of January 2024 has been overwhelming. In particular, Xiaohongshu's live broadcast of grass planting and JD.com's activities such as "taking away a penny of physical gifts, 100 million red envelopes, and "generous" ** giving away 100 cars have all boosted the market.
Taking Xiaohongshu as an example, after breaking through the 100 million daily active mark, it has also fallen into a bottleneck period. The reason why I chose to bring capital to the Spring Festival Gala is nothing more than to try to tap the sinking flow and break through the growth dilemma. Especially for Xiaohongshu, it is even more important to break through the traffic growth dilemma and promote its newly launched buyer e-commerce business. In the live broadcast room of "Everyone's Spring Festival Gala", Xiaohongshu began to sell the same clothing and peripherals of the Spring Festival Gala. According to data released by Xiaohongshu, on the day of the Chinese New Year's Eve, the number of notes related to the Spring Festival Gala exceeded 1.56 million. During the event period from January 19th to February 10th, more than 80 million users searched for content related to the Spring Festival Gala in the Xiaohongshu community, and more than 25 million users participated in sending notes and writing comments. Obviously, Xiaohongshu has attracted a lot of attention in this national party.
On December 22, 2023, at the Xiaohongshu WILL Business Conference, Xiaohongshu "opened the ecosystem" for the first time. Not only does it allow "off-site diversion", but it even opens up cross-platform data, sending a "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 more clear. Before the "opening up", Xiaohongshu's drastic reforms have also been implemented, live broadcast e-commerce, note-taking goods, and local life have all three arrows, and after cutting off the self-operated welfare cooperative, it quickly built a closed loop of on-site transactions.
It seems that Xiaohongshu's road to commercialization is beginning to be transparent. At the very least, open data and open search traffic may stimulate merchants and platforms to increase investment and form a more active ecosystem than today. However, an open ecosystem means the introduction of 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 can't grasp the initiative, it is easy to be "taken away" by the e-commerce platform.
In fact, not only Xiaohongshu, but also the community that emphasizes realism and interactivity, and the business that emphasizes efficiency and transformation has always had an irreconcilable contradiction, and oscillating between the two is also a common problem in the commercialization of all communities such as Zhihu and Bilibili.
The Spring Festival Gala added a fire to the commercialization process of Xiaohongshu. In the future, when thousands of merchants and brands pour in, commercialization continues to accelerate, the fragile balance between the three will often be gradually broken, and it is still unknown who will have the upper hand.