In 2013, a PDF document titled "Little Red Book's Overseas Shopping Guide" quietly made its debut. This document quickly gained attention, with downloads exceeding tens of thousands of times within a month.

In December of the same year, building on the success of this guide, Little Red Book officially launched its mobile application, positioning the platform as a community for sharing overseas shopping experiences. This move was timely and attracted a large number of users to share their international shopping experiences.

High-quality content and precise market positioning enabled Little Red Book to rapidly accumulate a user base. By August 2014, the number of users had reached several million.

Over time, Little Red Book gradually transitioned from a single shopping sharing platform to a content community covering various aspects of lifestyle. This transformation further expanded the platform's appeal, and the user base continued to grow.

However, with this growth came the emergence of commercialization challenges. Entering 2024, Little Red Book's organizational structure began to undergo frequent adjustments. Changes in responsible personnel, reorganization of departmental structures, and simplification of management levels all reflected the company's search for new directions.

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New Player in a Saturated Market

In September of this year, Little Red Book announced an eye-catching move: expanding its dining group buying feature from the original five first-tier cities to 49 cities nationwide.

This decision not only covered more provincial capitals and first-tier cities but also reached third-tier cities such as Linyi and Huizhou, showcasing Little Red Book's ambitions in the local lifestyle services sector.

To attract merchants to join, Little Red Book introduced attractive policies, emphasizing in its successively published related notes that for the dining category group buying, it offers "0 deposit to join, and for merchants who join before December 31, 2024, the commission rate, i.e., the technical service fee, is 0.6%."Xiaohongshu's recent major foray into the local lifestyle market faces a fiercely competitive field that has been deeply cultivated for many years. Meituan and Ele.me dominate the food delivery market, while content platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou have also laid out their strategies, and even cross-industry players like AutoNavi are continuously making efforts.

In such an environment, Xiaohongshu's entry undoubtedly faces numerous challenges. For Xiaohongshu, increasing its investment in local lifestyle services at this time means not only making greater commitments in terms of human resources and financial resources but also making significant strategic adjustments.

Transitioning from a community platform that mainly relies on user-generated content to a local lifestyle service provider that needs to actively expand and serve offline merchants requires a tremendous amount of organizational capability and resource allocation.

Unlike online business, local lifestyle services require a large amount of offline business development work. This means that Xiaohongshu needs to build a massive sales team and invest huge amounts of capital in market development. Looking back at ByteDance's experience in local lifestyle services, even giants with a large user base and strong financial strength need to invest in a marketing team of tens of thousands to barely establish a foothold.

Achieving a consumption loop from "planting grass" to "removing grass" is not a new thing for Xiaohongshu. As early as 2019, the platform introduced a store detail display function. In 2021, following the trend of camping and nearby tours, Xiaohongshu took steps in the hospitality category. In the first half of 2023, the platform launched group buying activities for categories such as coffee, tea, and baking in some cities. However, the actual impact of these attempts was not significant.

Against this backdrop, Xiaohongshu's decision to turn to the local lifestyle field, whether it can bring new development opportunities for itself, is still an unknown. Whether Xiaohongshu can find its own place in this already saturated market, and whether it can effectively convert its community influence into actual commercial value, the answers to these questions remain unresolved.

Can Li Dan become a traffic password?

The live e-commerce industry has recently shown a sluggish trend.Once top live streamers such as Li Jiaqi and Luo Yonghao have gradually reduced their live streaming frequency, and even faded from view. Dong Yuhui, a representative figure in the knowledge live streaming field, also faces more and more doubts after parting ways with Dongfang Zhenxuan. Xin Ba from Kuaishou plans to open a supermarket, and Xiao Yang, a popular live streamer on Douyin, is caught up in a public opinion storm, with his reputation plummeting.

Against this backdrop, Li Dan's name suddenly attracted attention in Xiaohongshu live broadcasts. In the latest "Buyer Business Value List" released by Xiaohongshu, Li Dan topped the list of food buyers, alongside Dong Jie, the first in the fashion buyer list, and Zhang Xiaohui, the first in the beauty care buyer list.

Li Dan's live streaming career began in 2020 in Douyin's "Make Friends" live room, but it did not immediately cause a sensation. In 2022, he switched to Taobao, and his first live broadcast achieved a sales volume of 32 million yuan, but he failed to maintain this momentum. It was not until 2024 that Li Dan started continuous live streaming on Xiaohongshu and truly entered the mainstream field of live streaming with goods.

Some people compare Li Dan to "the emotional version of Dong Yuhui", both of whom adopt the model of combining knowledge explanation or emotional viewpoints with live streaming sales. However, Li Dan is currently affiliated with the MCN organization Yizhihua, which is different from the path of Dong Yuhui and Dongfang Zhenxuan towards self-operated supply chain development. The anchor matrix where Li Dan is located also includes Dong Jie, Yang Tianzhen, Yi Li Jing, etc., and it is known for content output, with no signs of transforming upstream to self-operated supply chain.

Xiaohongshu's operational logic is also different from platforms such as Taobao and Douyin, focusing more on content quality and attractiveness, rather than simply pursuing sales volume. Perhaps it is this "content first, then e-commerce" philosophy that fits Li Dan's style.

From the early emphasis on the uniqueness of "buyer e-commerce" to the recent proposal of the broader concept of "lifestyle e-commerce". Xiaohongshu's idea has always been to explore a broader development space while striving to maintain its unique market position.

Li Dan's performance on the Xiaohongshu platform is also a microcosm of this development strategy to some extent. His relatively leisurely live streaming style complements Xiaohongshu's pursuit of high-quality content and lifestyle aesthetics.

However, under this seemingly leisurely appearance, there is a cruel reality of the e-commerce industry - in the end, it still needs to be spoken with actual sales data.

Xiaohongshu's current business philosophy, although it has created a unique platform temperament, may also restrict rapid expansion in the e-commerce field invisibly.

In the context of the current e-commerce industry's rapid iteration and fierce competition, relying solely on good reputation and high-quality content may not be able to support long-term business success. The challenge Xiaohongshu faces is how to maintain the platform's characteristics while achieving considerable commercial transformation.Li Dan's addition undoubtedly injects new vitality and topicality into the platform, but whether this short-term heat can be transformed into long-term commercial value still remains to be tested by the market.

As major e-commerce events such as Double 11 approach, how Xiaohongshu can convert the current accumulated user attention and content advantages into actual sales performance will be a crucial test.

The monetization dilemma of content platforms

Xiaohongshu's unique position in the field of content platforms is undoubted, especially its achievements in "planting grass" are obvious to all. However, from arousing user interest to ultimately realizing purchase conversion, this seemingly perfect consumption loop faces many challenges in practice.

Xiaohongshu has been committed to building this loop for many years, but the reality is that for companies and brands, Xiaohongshu plays more of a role in advertising and promotion, rather than a direct sales channel. This situation reflects the platform's potential bottleneck in commercial monetization.

The management of Xiaohongshu has realized this problem and is trying to deal with it by building a commercial system that conforms to the characteristics of the platform. However, while pursuing commercialization, how to maintain the purity of the community and user experience has become a difficult balance problem. Over-commercialization may damage the core value of the platform, while being too conservative may miss important business opportunities.

Now, Xiaohongshu not only needs to prove itself as a product with continuous growth, but also needs to show the market its potential as a profitable business company. Under this dual pressure, every step the platform takes on the road to commercialization is particularly cautious and crucial. In the future, whether Xiaohongshu can find an innovative model that can meet both commercial needs and maintain the community atmosphere will be the key factor in determining its long-term success.