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For friends who are surfing the Internet during this period, the smooth experience of immersive short video watching is often interrupted.

It’s not the video that appears once an hour to remind you to take a break, nor the occasional brand advertisement, but the “Croissant"Promotional graphics.

After watching 5 funny videos with cheesy BGMs in a row, the next second, pictures and texts of exquisite outfits and niche films suddenly appeared in the corner, and the account was marked with "Croissant".

Not only is Douyin willing to use up its traffic to promote the app, it also has many bloggers directly promoting the app.

Internet companies that have always been vigilant against competing products will naturally not advertise for their "rivals".

Croissant is a product of Douyin, which focuses on promoting community interests and is mainly in the form of pictures and texts.

@Qiqi Smile (Growing Version)

The positioning and functions sounded familiar, so I downloaded one to check it out myself. I almost thought I accidentally opened the real Xiaohongshu.

Croissant’s interface also has a double-column waterfall-style content flow, with “Follow” on the left and “Discover” on the right. It has one less city column than Xiaohongshu.

The content is mainly concentrated in the fields of travel guides, food exploration, makeup sharing, etc., and there is a lot of overlap with Xiaohongshu's advantageous categories.

Left: Xiaohongshu, right: Croissant

Tik Tok’s monthly active users have stabilized at 700 million, and Xiaohongshu’s monthly active users have reached nearly 300 million. The Internet battle has become a red ocean, and the user scale has almost reached its peak.

It is said that business wars between large companies are good for consumers, but this is not necessarily the case on the Internet.

What the platforms are competing for is not the price-performance ratio of their products, but how to retain users and make them "spend" more on them.

Douyin wants to create a new Xiaohongshu, but the limited time, energy and money have already been divided up by the giants.

01

“The gameplay of the pages is the same

"Simplified version of Xiaohongshu"

Tik Tok’s “blood transfusion” to Croissants is directly displayed on the surface.

Users who have been forcibly recommended the app in the Tik Tok information flow can go to the app store and search for this grass-planting type community APP.

The labels on the APP’s schematic interface include beauty inspiration, outdoor methods, and city life sharing, which are also the “moat” content that Xiaohongshu excels at.

After downloading, you will find that Croissant can only be logged in through TikTok.

And by default, it will apply for the permission of the Douyin account and synchronize some information of Douyin users.

The shopping column of Xiaohongshu is the "game play" in Croissant. Users can see various topic challenges and be guided to participate in content creation and account operation, which is similar to the hot spot gameplay of Xiaohongshu.

Now that Xiaohongshu will not be easily shaken, it is not a good time to enter the field of graphic and text content promotion.

But for Douyin, this is its first attempt after two years, and it does not want to hand over its traffic directly to competitors.

In April this year, Croissants, which had been off the shelves for nearly two years, was restarted. Internal sources said that this move was to better build Douyin's graphic and text ecology and improve Douyin's ability to plant grass.

The slogan was also changed to "Unlock a trendy and high-profile lifestyle", making it clear that the target group is young people with certain consumption ability and willingness.

The creator of Croissant interviewed by "Tech Planet" revealed that Croissant will launch a creator plan to encourage users to create. Not only can they get the promotion of Croissant, but also get the exposure support of Douyin.

@Entertainment girl

Tik Tok’s algorithm has always emphasized the logic of hot spots and explosive products, which is not well integrated with the “grass planting” that pursues long-tail traffic.

Xiaohongshu’s external publicity of “ordinary user-friendly” means that it uses relatively decentralized traffic distribution to benefit as diverse content as possible, pays attention to collection indicators, and enables content to receive long-tail recommendations.

Previously, the public positioned Xiaohongshu as an information flow platform that is very suitable for "browsing", but internal data at the beginning of this year showed that the share of users' "browsing" and "searching" has reached nearly 50-50.

In fact, from recent marketing actions, we can see that Xiaohongshu emphasizes the search function.

"You can find small towns with few people and beautiful scenery, and amazing football skills." This unique grass-growing software in China defines itself as "the encyclopedia of life for 300 million people."

Entertainment Capital Theory believes that Xiaohongshu’s users have gradually transformed their consumption habits from “browsing” to “searching”.

Users make consumption decisions through "high-frequency searches", which has become a unique barrier that distinguishes Xiaohongshu from other information flow platforms, rather than simply being a fun place to browse.

At present, the traffic distribution characteristics of Croissant have not yet been clearly revealed, but one noticeable move is the strengthening of the search function.

Community-based grass-roots products are different from hot information products. The needs of users when they open the products are difficult to create and predict.

This requires that products have more vertical and more segmented categories to refine user preferences.

For example, when users search for new Chinese-style makeup, they will be searched for hair styling tutorials; when searching for sugar-free tea, they will be recommended DIY drinking methods in convenience stores.

As e-commerce gradually cools down, the value of planting grass is more reflected in search and deep conversion decisions.

After watching short videos or live broadcasts and becoming interested in a low-priced or novel product, many people will search for keywords on other platforms to read blogger reviews and amateur comments, and then make a purchase after making a decision.

According to industry insiders who work in brand placement, 90% of brands on the market are placed on multiple platforms in combination. E-commerce has multiple platforms to choose from, but the consumer decision-making in the previous link requires more thought.

Two years ago, Douyin e-commerce proposed "global interest e-commerce" - using short videos, live broadcasts and other content as the conversion field to stimulate user interests, and shopping malls, searches, etc. as the conversion fields to undertake them.

The growth of Douyin's e-commerce has gradually peaked. If we want to open up a new logic for people to find goods, we need to create content that promotes users' search behavior.

The user decision-making link requires a community product to take over, and Croissant is expected to play a high role in this regard.

At the same time, within the site, Douyin, as a short video platform, has repeatedly strengthened its graphic and text attributes, intending toComplete the grass-planting link within the platform.

Previous data showed that the collection rate of Douyin's graphic and text content is 1.47 times that of videos, and the interaction rate is 1.32 times that of videos.

For brands and platforms, "pictures and texts still have advantages in terms of high-density, long-term accumulation of valuable information."

In 2021, Douyin launched a plan to support billions of traffic for pictures and texts. Douyin e-commerce also launched the "Picture and Text Gold Digging Plan" to increase the conversion of grass-seeding traffic.

The 2022 Tik Tok Creator Conference officially announced that pictures and texts will become the focus of business in the future.

In June last year, Douyin launched the "Experience" channel at the top level entrance of the APP homepage, which mainly contains pictures, texts and short videos, and is classified into multiple categories such as food and clothing, travel and home. It is called the "Little Red Book" embedded in Douyin.

Based on ByteDance’s past product development style, industry insiders believe that this re-operation of Croissants is not aimed at increasing users, but rather at grabbing some traffic and users from other competing products.

After all, the mobile Internet has almost reached its ceiling, and the cost of developing new users is likely to be higher than poaching users from competitors.

02

All apps are engaged in content business

Users can no longer see

As a behavior with more social attributes, grass-planting is an important part of the "user mind" that major Internet companies want to capture.

Each platform has seen the potential for commercial success and hopes to use content sharing to boost the platform's monetization and consumer transaction conversions.

So it is obvious that every APP wants to become a grass-planting community and support UGC grass-planting content.

Their launch or modification are all considered to have more or less traces of Xiaohongshu.

Tik Tok "Experience" page

The developer of Croissant is Faceu Technology, a subsidiary of ByteDance. The company also has a photo beauty software called "Qingyan".

Since the year before last, it has gradually transformed into a community product, launched the Qingyan Partner Program, invited top creators to join, and focused on trendy beauty and photography skills.

Last year, Toutiao launched a community product called "Youshi" for life experience, which aims to help users discover more real and useful strategies and practical life skills.

It has similar ideas and page designs to Xiaohongshu, but the difference is that "Youshi" is more like a product for the sinking market and is called the "Toutiao version of Xiaohongshu."

From the perspective of content, it is more down-to-earth, and from the perspective of operation, it adopts the "online earning model", and generally uses red envelopes, points, and virtual currency to encourage user retention.

Other Internet companies are also trying to get a piece of the pie in the grass-growing market. Since 2018, Xiaohongshu's user growth has entered the fast lane, and "competitive products" on the market have begun to emerge in large numbers.

Especially for those companies whose business models have not yet been fully implemented and are highly dependent on one of their products,We hope to change the current situation through community economy and grass-planting economy.

Zhihu launched the "boys' version of Xiaohongshu" CHAO, and Momo launched the young people's sharing community Raspberry to compete with Xiaohongshu; NetEase wanted to seize the point of emotional video interaction and made a "video version of Xiaohongshu" BIYING.

However, these softwares have not yet grown into leading products, with active users remaining in the tens of millions or even millions, becoming cannon fodder in the war for users among big companies.

The interface @wna

Not only does this type of content-based software want to replicate the success of Xiaohongshu, but companies that focus on functional apps are also joining in the fun.

They don't necessarily take the risk of developing new software directly.Implant the "content" into the original APP.

Before, everyone was rushing to jump on the live streaming sales trend, but now everyone is focusing on building communities and content ecosystems.

Taobao’s Buyer Show community has been upgraded to “Guangguang”, a pure ad version of Xiaohongshu, with one-click jump to the corresponding link;

Meituan has set "video" in a fixed bottom bar, allowing everyone to scroll through the "Meituan version of Douyin" and watch short dramas while waiting for takeout.

JD.com has a built-in "Browse" menu, and "Browse" has embedded live broadcasts, recommendations, reviews, etc., which almost include all content forms on the current Internet.

Taobao, Meituan, and JD.com are on the left, middle, and right.

Many platforms have opened "grass planting" sections in various forms, including "grass planting shows" in the form of pictures and texts and "expert planting grass" in the form of short videos.

There is usually a purchase link on the content display page, so you can directly jump to the shopping page to place an order.

According to Taobao’s “Double 11” data in 2021, more than 250 million consumers were “planted” by browsing Taobao during the Double 11 period.

The purpose of planting grass is to promote the e-commerce business of the platform itself.The purpose of building a community atmosphere and driving user interests is to maximize commercial value.

Xiaohongshu, which every platform wants to "emulate", is actually not on an stable track. It is "envious" of other platforms' online consumption models and wants to make up for the shortcomings of its own incomplete commercialization chain.

In the past two years, Xiaohongshu has stepped up its efforts in live streaming sales, brand user introduction and operations, hoping that users can complete both the promotion and removal of products on its own platform.

However, problems such as false advertising and poor management of third parties continue to exist, and market feedback and user experience are mixed.

Xiaohongshu is not satisfied with just being a content community and watching its well-cultivated users flow to other shopping platforms.

Shopping platforms are also worried that Xiaohongshu will steal their business, so the two sides try to copy each other's every "successful move."

03

Internet growth is sluggish

They all want to "trap" users in their own apps

Whether it is a content-based or functional platform, we want to focus on both traffic and GMV.

You can watch short dramas on Douyin, Kuaishou, Taobao and Meituan; the short video versions of Xiaohongshu and Bilibili both include a "mini Douyin"; those that originally operated interest communities, those that focused on recording a good life, and those that claimed to be generating power for love are all keeping a close eye on the closed loop of planting grass and placing orders.

What is finally presented to everyone isAll apps are becoming more and more similar, with live broadcasts, short plays, and pictures and texts embedded in every corner of the Internet.

It’s no wonder that everyone complains that software is becoming more and more bloated, taking up several GB of memory at any time.

“Little Douyin” in Taobao and Meituan

Functions and attributes are becoming more and more complex, but the fundamentals of each APP are rarely in place.

It is more difficult to carefully verify the safety qualifications of takeout shops offline and find ways to supervise counterfeit merchants than to tinker with the fancy functions of apps online.

How to ensure the authenticity and credibility of grass-planting content and guide the accumulation of high-quality content is an issue that all platforms that want to do grass-planting business should consider and invest resources to manage.

This is a difficulty in platform governance recognized by the industry, which requires the platform to take a long-term view and plan for the long-term prosperity of the platform ecosystem.

Embedding "castrated versions of Xiaohongshu and Douyin" into the APP, under the euphemism of a deep understanding and precise satisfaction of user needs, is also an obvious way to keep oneself from falling behind in the melee.

The copy-and-paste content that pours in seems abundant, and the data on reposts, likes, comments, and user stay time seem to be able to be reported upwards.

But in the Internet age, everyone's attention span is extremely limited.There is no such thing as loyalty to software.

Each company copies the same "123 to link" and "Da Zhuang Xiao Mei" fast food content, and thus loses its irreplaceability.

At this critical juncture, Douyin is vigorously promoting croissants, which can be regarded as Douyin's direct grabbing of Xiaohongshu users.

Interestingly, some people believe that Douyin’s launch of Croissants two years ago and its hasty removal was a self-selection within the group - they did not want to follow in the footsteps of Xiaohongshu.

In 2022, the consumer group has not yet formed the habit of placing orders through Douyin live broadcasts, and there is still a qualitative gap between Douyin e-commerce and Taobao and JD.com.

When users are attracted to a product, they are likely to open Taobao or JD.com and pay for it on the platform.

If Croissant continues to develop, it may end up working for e-commerce giants for free, just like Xiaohongshu.

Tik Tok, which did not want to provide a transfusion to its rival, stopped launching Croissants after just one month of trial.

Looking back now, it is difficult to evaluate whether this was the right choice from a business perspective.

All we can say is that ordinary users have been exploited by various platforms to the point where nothing is left.

Two years ago, people were trained to check reviews in grass-roots communities and shop in live broadcast rooms. Two years later, they were expected to switch to a new software, which became the footnote of a new business story.