On March 5, Zhihu officially submitted its prospectus. After asking the question for ten years, it finally delivered a satisfactory answer to the capital market. Xiaohongshu, also a content platform, has also been rumored to be going public since its establishment in 2013, but none of them have been confirmed.

From "Find good things from all over the world" to "Mark my life", the change in slogan also shows that Xiaohongshu has returned from "cross-border e-commerce" to "content community". The grass-planting base is Xiaohongshu’s highlight label, but the difficult road of e-commerce monetization in recent years has also made it begin to pay attention to the possibilities of content.

Advertising revenue has always been the bulk of Xiaohongshu and Zhihu’s income. What are the similarities and differences between the two platforms in terms of advertising? What value do the two platforms have that needs to be explored for advertisers?

In terms of user portraits, Xiaohongshu and Zhihu have both differences and similarities.

In terms of gender ratio, Xiaohongshu is dominated by girls, while Zhihu is more balanced. This may be caused by the fact that Xiaohongshu's labels in beauty and product recommendation are too deeply rooted. Over 60% of users of both platforms are under the age of 30, and both are communities for young people .

Xiaohongshu has more choices in advertising resources, while Zhihu appears to be more "restrained". In terms of brand advertising, both Xiaohongshu and Zhihu allow a high degree of freedom.

In the same field, Xiaohongshu and Zhihu have formed their own unique niches. Although their tones are different, as content-based platforms they all face the same problem – difficulty in monetization , or appear to be overly dependent on advertising revenue.

2-1 People on Zhihu are keen on making friends

According to Zhihu's prospectus, Zhihu's main source of revenue in 2020 was still advertising, with the growth rate soaring from 22% in the first quarter to 72% in the fourth quarter. This is also an affirmation by advertisers for Zhihu's population and content monetization.

Looking at the year 2020 as a whole, games, social dating, and comprehensive e-commerce advertisements accounted for the highest proportion on Zhihu, among which game advertisements accounted for 19.42% . Comparing the advertising situation in Q1 2020 and Q1 2021, the industry with the highest share in 2020 was gaming , but in 2021 it became social dating and marriage , accounting for as much as 34.97% .

It is speculated that due to the influence of many factors such as staying at home due to the epidemic and the pressure to get married during the Spring Festival, people's demand for socializing and making friends is becoming increasingly obvious. At the same time, there are countless "lonely intellectuals" on Zhihu.

In addition to the increase in advertising revenue, the successful exploration of membership fees and commercial content has also given Zhihu the vitality to diversify its monetization. On the Zhihu platform, there is a lot of content that requires a Yanxuan membership to view, including many exciting novels.

The recent hit of "The Son-in-Law" proves that the commercial industry chain of cool novels has become mature. For novel advertisers, there is also greater conversion potential among the members on Zhihu who are willing to pay for "cool novels".

Moreover, the data shows that the proportion of cultural and entertainment-related advertisements on Zhihu remains between 7-8%, which still has a lot of room for improvement compared to the social marriage and dating industry.

2-2 Xiaohongshu users are keen on shopping

The industry share of advertisements on Xiaohongshu has changed little. In the fourth quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year, the three industries with the largest number of advertisements were skin care and beauty, clothing, shoes and bags, and wedding services . The content of the advertisements was mostly related to dressing and shopping. Among them, skin care and beauty advertisements accounted for more than 30%.

In comparison, the gaming industry is not as successful on Xiaohongshu. Even games targeting females have difficulty making a splash on Xiaohongshu . When placing advertisements, it is inevitable to bundle a certain product and then transfer it to the game. The reason is that there are more women among the people in Xiaohongshu, but fewer female mobile game players .

2-3 The advertising materials are obviously different: Xiaohongshu focuses on pictures, while Zhihu focuses on texts

When the two platforms were first established, their original content was mostly in the form of pictures and texts. Xiaohongshu focused more on pictures than text, while Zhihu focused on in-depth and long articles.

As short videos are popular, both major platforms have chosen to open up video content, and Zhihu is even pushing the quantification of video content. However, according to the data , more than 80% of Xiaohongshu's advertisements are picture ads, while more than half of Zhihu's advertisements are pure text ads.

It is obvious that users are more receptive to the old methods, so advertisers still prefer to adopt the advertising form that best suits the platform's tone to reach users.

2-4 E-commerce and social apps are highly recommended on Zhihu

Among the game apps on Zhihu, there are many games about war strategy, two-dimensional, and casual gameplay . As a platform that mainly distributes pictures and texts, large-scale mobile games with exquisite graphics are obviously more popular. "My Knight", which is at the top of the list, is published by Tencent Aurora Project. "King of Avalon", as an old IP of Qujia, has achieved remarkable results in overseas markets.

"CHAO", which is on the non-game list, is a "male version of Xiaohongshu" community promoted by Zhihu, which has been given sufficient exposure support on its own platform.

3-1 Xiaohongshu: Carrying out “refinement” to the end

Advertisements on Xiaohongshu are still dominated by high-definition beauty photos of internet celebrities, detailed pictures of lip/eye makeup, before and after comparisons of fitness/whitening, and retouched photography samples , with overall efforts focused on picture quality and image quality.

3-2 Zhihu: Users have questions, advertisers have “answers”

They are often disguised as “question cards” to attract users to click on them. However, on platforms that mainly share text, it is common practice to use advertisements that are closer to native content to reach users.

However, Zhihu has more and more live broadcast and short video entrances, which have changed from being concentrated in graphic content to a B-style recommendation flow layout. The gameplay of video advertising will also become richer, and it is hard to say that there will be no increase in support for video traffic in the future.

So far, no personalized recommended video ads have been found, but the videos that appear on the recommended homepage have high playback volumes, with a few exceeding one million, indicating that Zhihu has accumulated a certain amount of traffic in the video section.

For content-based platforms with strong user purpose, SEO keyword ranking is also a focus of brand owners.

When brand similarity is high, improving the accuracy of keywords can increase brand exposure and attract more precise audiences.

Based on the data of CC Data Beauty Edition and Xiaohongshu SEO monitoring tool, let’s analyze how the leading beauty brands use SEO to build the Xiaohongshu content marketing matrix .

4-1 Top 3 brands with the most interactions on Xiaohongshu: M · A · C, Yves Saint Laurent, and Lancome

The top brands with high interactive volume on Xiaohongshu are basically beauty brands, and most of them are foreign brands.

4-2 In the competition of ingredient words, three major brands are struggling for the "essence"

Taking Lancome, Estee Lauder and L'Oréal Paris as examples, we can see that in the proportion of notes on product ingredient functional words, the three brands have a large number of notes appearing on "essence" , so the competition in essence-related products is the most intense, followed by moisturizing.

On Xiaohongshu, "essence" and "whitening" are often mentioned in Lancome's latest Top 100 notes, and "essence" is often mentioned in the hottest Top 100 notes.

4-3 Lancome and L'Oréal Paris focus on graphic notes, while Estee Lauder develops video notes

In terms of the format of the top 100 most popular notes, picture and text notes from Lancôme and L'Oréal Paris account for more than 70%, while Estee Lauder is actively trying video notes, with a higher proportion of video notes than the other two brands.

When it comes to selecting influencers for advertising, Lancome prefers influencers with 100,000 to 1 million followers , while Estee Lauder and L'Oréal Paris prefer bloggers with less than 10,000 followers .

On the one hand, this is related to the brand’s own positioning. On the other hand, the number of fans cannot directly determine the purchase rate. Under the same budget, it may be more cost-effective to deploy small bloggers in batches than to buy out big Vs.

At present, both Zhihu and Xiaohongshu have found monetization strategies that can adapt to the development of the platforms.

Zhihu has been committed to accumulating content for ten years, taking a stable and restrained commercialization path, being wary of the "trap" of rapid growth and monetization, and protecting the community atmosphere and user experience;

Xiaohongshu has returned from high-profile growth to low-key. Relying on high-quality content sharing and continuous traffic introduction, it has gone from being a catalyst for overseas brands to becoming an important platform for local brands to build their popularity.

Both platforms have undoubtedly successfully established their own "irreplaceability", but the road to commercialization is long and difficult, and Xiaohongshu and Zhihu are still on the road.

Their ambition to expand will not change. As niche communities become popular, with the growth of the population, the entry of different users will also cause the platform's labels to change dynamically. Zhihu and Xiaohongshu will not only maintain their existing labels, but will be more inclusive in accepting the entry of different advertisers, and increase the possibility of conversion for different advertisers, becoming a popular advertising base after ByteDance and Tencent.

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Author: App Growing

Source: App Growing