Xiaohongshu: The Platform Where 'TikTok Refugees' Arrived — and Stayed

In January 2025, amid the threat of a TikTok ban in the US, millions of Western users installed Xiaohongshu / 小红书 (known abroad as RedNote) within days — the platform gained roughly 3 million new international users in just 72 hours. The wave of interest subsided, but the platform didn't lose the audience it gained: by 2026, monthly active users had passed 400 million, against the company's internal targets of 700 million MAU and 250 million DAU.

From notes to purchases

Xiaohongshu was originally built as a hybrid social network and review platform — users share notes about products, travel, beauty and lifestyle rather than just short videos. That format turned out to be unexpectedly effective for e-commerce: in 2024 the platform's revenue reached RMB 30.68 billion (up 30% year-on-year), and e-commerce payment GMV grew 64% to RMB 73.5 billion. More recent estimates put the platform's annual trading volume near a trillion yuan, with advertising making up roughly RMB 32 billion of overall 2025 revenue of about RMB 42 billion.

Why it matters to brands

For overseas and Chinese brands alike, Xiaohongshu isn't just another advertising venue — it's a channel where purchase decisions form through recommendations from "peer" users rather than direct celebrity endorsement. That makes the platform especially valuable for categories where trust in a review matters — beauty, travel, home goods. Understanding this promotion and sales model, characteristic of Chinese internet retail, is part of the China Tech Giants Expedition, which shows how China's largest internet platforms actually operate behind the scenes.

International potential remains uncertain

Despite the surge of international interest in early 2025, Xiaohongshu has no clear public strategy for converting that wave into a durable overseas user base — the platform remains predominantly a Chinese product, with Chinese as the default interface language and a Chinese-centric content base. For global brands, this means the channel currently functions more as a window into the Chinese consumer than as a full-fledged international social network.

What it means for the market

Xiaohongshu's case shows how a platform originally built around trust between users, rather than a viral video format, managed to convert that model into a steady and fast-growing e-commerce business — with trading volume growth outpacing overall revenue growth, meaning purchase monetization is becoming an increasingly significant source of company income.

The "note" format, not short video

Unlike Douyin or Kuaishou, where the core content unit remains short video, Xiaohongshu's core is a text-and-photo note with video elements. This format demands more effort from creators to produce, but it also creates longer-lived, better-indexed content: a note about a specific product can generate traffic and sales for months after publication, while a viral video's lifecycle on other platforms is measured in days. That's one reason brands treat Xiaohongshu more like a search engine with social features than just another short-video feed.

Regulatory and reputational risks

The rapid influx of Western users in early 2025 handed the platform unfamiliar challenges — from moderating English-language content to data-privacy questions for foreign users stored on Chinese servers. The company hasn't publicly announced a separate international version of the product with local data storage, which may limit corporate advertisers' willingness in some countries to work with the platform directly rather than through local partners.

A female-skewed audience as the foundation of the ad model

A distinctive feature of Xiaohongshu that helps explain its high purchase conversion is its historically female-skewed user base, a large share of which falls within the age group with the strongest purchasing power in beauty, fashion and home-goods categories. For brands operating in exactly those categories, this concentration of a target audience on a single platform is more valuable than broader but less-focused reach on general-purpose platforms — hence the 21.4% conversion rate the platform reports for global brands advertising on it.

Sources

User and revenue data drawn from TechBuzz China, MarketingToChina, Hashmeta and sendshort.ai coverage from 2025–2026.