Winning the World Cup, Xiaohongshu Aims to Be a "Community of Communities"

Text by Zhang Guo

A 39 - day world - class carnival is about to take place on Xiaohongshu.

A few days ago, Xiaohongshu officially announced that it had become the rights - holding broadcaster for the 2026 FIFA World Cup in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It will broadcast 104 matches and obtain rights such as match replays and secondary creation.

The World Cup has never been just a football event. Over the past few decades, this world's largest sports IP has been both a battlefield for brands to compete for attention and an important stage for platforms to tell new stories. From sponsors to broadcasters, almost every participant tries to start their new stories with the World Cup.

The reason is not complicated. In an era when attention is becoming more and more fragmented, few events can make billions of people focus on the same thing simultaneously like the World Cup. It is the "greatest common divisor" of global traffic.

For Xiaohongshu, behind the huge - amount copyright deal, it's not simply a matter of buying and selling traffic.

When Xiaohongshu aims to be a "community of communities", when facing a super - public event with billions of people's attention, what Xiaohongshu can receive and what it can retain become even more important. This is also an important window to re - observe Xiaohongshu.

What will be left after the World Cup?

On the last night before the start of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, Ma Ning, who served as a World Cup referee for two consecutive sessions, appeared in Xiaohongshu's live - streaming room. Sitting beside him was Fan Zhiyi, the former captain of the Chinese men's national football team.

Two iconic faces in Chinese football history appeared in a live - streaming session on Xiaohongshu. The topics ranged from what was in Ma Ning's referee bag, how to become a World Cup referee, the penalty rules on the football field, to hot topics derived from his strict yellow - card and red - card penalties, and they also talked about their past World Cup experiences.

This live - streaming session is also a microcosm of how Xiaohongshu is approaching the World Cup this year. From the perspectives of players and coaches, starting from people's experiences, the World Cup is broken down into specific life - related topics.

For a long time, the World Cup copyright market has followed a relatively clear logic: platforms buy event copyrights, gain a large amount of traffic, and then achieve monetization through advertising, memberships, and business cooperation. For broadcasting platforms, the World Cup is a typical attention - based business.

However, for a community platform like Xiaohongshu, the significance of the World Cup is obviously more than just the broadcast itself.

The World Cup's natural ability to cross different circles is a super - topic entry for Xiaohongshu, and the community is a natural discussion venue. Football fans will focus on the matches, ordinary users will pay attention to star players, brands will focus on marketing, content creators will look for topics, and even those who don't usually watch football will join the discussion because of the World Cup.

Xiaohongshu is not new to the sports field. During the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, football - related content began to explode on the community. Xiaohongshu attracted world - class star players to join, and community users spontaneously talked about football rules and watching experiences. The Blokecore style of football jersey dressing also became popular. During the European Championship, Kylian Mbappé, as Xiaohongshu's spokesperson, his phrase "Xiao ong shu~" with a French accent became a hot topic across the internet.

In the past few years, Xiaohongshu has further accelerated its layout in the sports ecosystem. From the Bundesliga to the German Super Cup, from Chinese national team matches to city football leagues, more and more sports events have entered the platform's content system.

Football has gradually grown from a marginal interest to an important content segment. Data released by Xiaohongshu shows that the number of people interested in "football" on Xiaohongshu has exceeded 100 million. In the past year, the volume of interactive discussions related to "football" on Xiaohongshu has increased by more than 100% year - on - year.

In Xiaohongshu's community ecosystem, football content has naturally differentiated into two core user groups and two content systems.

For hardcore football fans, the World Cup remains a top - level professional event. Athletes, coaches, media personnel, and senior fans discuss topics such as on - site watching experiences, match commentaries, tactics, formation analyses, match predictions, and post - match reviews, forming more vertical and professional football content.

For a wider range of casual fans and ordinary users, the World Cup is a life event. Some people share moments of staying up late to watch the matches, some look for companions to watch the games together, and some share famous moments on the field and star players' dressing styles through secondary - created content, making football topics spread to all aspects of daily life.

The two types of content form a "football interest community" on Xiaohongshu, and users with different understandings and needs all have the opportunity to participate in the World Cup discussions.

After all, for most people, sports are first a life interest and then a competitive event.

In the past few years, the popularity of outdoor content such as frisbee, cycling, camping, and hiking on Xiaohongshu, as well as the rise of local leagues like the Scottish Premiership, have gone beyond the scope of simple competitive events and become part of young people's lifestyles.

When this logic is applied to the World Cup, the significance of the event is no longer just the wins and losses of 104 matches, but the continuous and multi - angle community discussions brought by the World Cup. The event broadcast is just the starting point, and users' opinions, emotional resonances, and life records during the process are the real assets of a community.

Therefore, if traditional platforms solve the need of "how to watch the matches", Xiaohongshu may also answer: what else can be talked about, experienced, and shared besides the matches. This is also a new way to approach the World Cup.

Before the World Cup, Xiaohongshu "transformed" itself

The World Cup can bring traffic, and the event will surely create a traffic peak. However, when the event ends, whether these users are still willing to stay is a common problem faced by almost all event - copyright businesses.

For Xiaohongshu today, the specialness of the World Cup lies in the fact that it occurs at a completely different development stage from the past.

In many people's fixed impressions, Xiaohongshu is still a platform mainly for discussions on beauty, dressing, and travel. But in fact, more and more interest verticals that were once considered "not like Xiaohongshu" are taking root and growing on Xiaohongshu and finding their own ecological positions.

36Kr noticed that last year, the content of game and anime verticals on Xiaohongshu grew rapidly and has become the core verticals second only to food and fashion on the platform. Before 2023, Xiaohongshu didn't even have a separate "anime" vertical. At the same time, technology - related content has risen rapidly in the past two years. More than 160,000 developers have been exploring real user needs and validating product directions on Xiaohongshu, regarding it as an important innovation ecosystem and rewriting the old industry rules in the "Build in Public" mode.

Behind these changes, a more crucial trend is emerging: represented by games, anime, technology, entertainment, etc., vertical interest communities are naturally growing from the Xiaohongshu ecosystem, ultimately evolving Xiaohongshu into a "community of communities".

Countless small communities are continuously growing in the large ecosystem: some people discuss football matches, some study AI; some share football jersey dressing styles, some exchange ideas about photography equipment; some stay up late to follow the World Cup, and some study yeast fermentation and niche handicrafts in the community. These interest circles seem independent of each other but share the same community ecosystem.

Different interests are not isolated from each other but are in continuous flow and intersection. A user who comes to Xiaohongshu because of the World Cup live - streaming may ultimately choose to stay, probably not because of football itself. He may first focus on the event content and then be attracted by interest circles such as cycling, outdoor activities, and dressing. Football is just one of the entry points for users to enter the Xiaohongshu community.

As the community population becomes more diverse, Xiaohongshu has also been continuously iterating its product container. According to 36Kr's summary, in the past year, Xiaohongshu has successively launched more than ten product functions such as horizontal videos, voice comments, Q&A, podcasts, and UGC citation and forwarding. For content scenarios such as events and long - videos, it has launched optimizations such as free 4K high - definition viewing and front - placed comment sections in combination with the World Cup node, continuously improving the content consumption and real - time discussion experience.

These product actions, although seemingly scattered and independent, essentially solve the same core problem: how to enable more users with different interests to find suitable ways of expression and get positive creative feedback in the community.

The World Cup is exactly an extreme stress test - from event live - streaming to secondary - created content, almost all content forms will explode during the event period.

From this perspective, the World Cup is also an ultimate test of Xiaohongshu's comprehensive platform capabilities: it tests not only whether Xiaohongshu can undertake this super - IP of the World Cup, but also whether it has the complete ecological ability to carry large - scale public events. And this question points to the future of the entire community.

A community of communities, a new model yet to be defined

If we look at the evolution of Chinese Internet communities in the long run, we will find that communities have gone through several obvious changes.

In the earliest days, there were typical forum communities such as Mop and Tianya. People gathered around different topics. For example, there were clear boundaries between the automotive, sports, and digital sections, which were more like a collection of different content "sections".

Later, more vertical communities emerged. Platforms established order around different vertical interests such as games, mother - and - baby, and home furnishing. They had clear content paradigms and stronger identity recognition. Different vertical communities gathered different enthusiasts, and there were also obvious boundaries. Users would not talk about decoration in the Xiachufang (a cooking - related platform) product. Many vertical communities ultimately failed in the process of generalization.

This model has developed for a long time, but real life and people's interests are naturally fluid. This is why it is becoming more and more difficult to simply classify Xiaohongshu today.

In the past, Internet platforms were used to dividing users by demographic labels such as age, gender, and region. But on Xiaohongshu, users are increasingly being re - organized according to interests rather than identities. The same user can be a football fan, a photography enthusiast, a cycling player, and a game player at the same time.

Xiaohongshu's community boundaries are very blurred, and it does not follow the logic of "from vertical to generalization". Instead, it starts from life and allows different interests to grow. In this sense, Xiaohongshu is more like an expanding city. Different interests are in different blocks, with their own cultures and orders. There are no strict boundaries between different interests. The exit of one community is often the entrance of another community.

To support this growth, Xiaohongshu has been polishing its infrastructure in recent years. From pictures and texts to long - form articles, podcasts, horizontal videos, voice comments, Q&A, and the Redskill component, it uses multi - modal forms to allow various forms of content to have a place in the community and provides productivity tools suitable for different expressions.

Compared with the past when users were divided by age, gender, and region, Xiaohongshu today pays more attention to how interests grow. In the words of a person close to Xiaohongshu, community growth now increasingly depends on the collaborative ability of product, operation, and R & D. It is no longer simply about generalizing to attract new users, but about continuous operation around trends, populations, and circles, driving the non - linear growth of the entire community through the growth of vertical interests.

This is also the most important feature of a "community of communities". The organizational unit of the community is no longer the content itself, nor the user group in the demographic sense, but the continuous flow and connection between interests.

More importantly, this change corresponds to the current changes in the Internet environment.

For a long time in the past, the Internet solved the problem of information scarcity. But today, information has become extremely abundant, and what users really lack is often not answers, but "trusted and real answers".

Many people have similar experiences. When you search for an obscure question, what you finally find is often not an official explanation, but an experience sharing left by an ordinary user. As the Internet has developed to the present, truly valuable content increasingly comes from the real lives of ordinary people: the experience of using a product for three months, the emotional expression after watching a World Cup match, and the luggage storage guide for a remote town.

Many pieces of content stand out because enough users think they are useful, trustworthy, or interesting, relying on the collective judgment of real users. Therefore, a "community of communities" does not just mean that the platform has more interest circles, but means that a network for continuously producing experiences and precipitating trust is being formed.

When we examine the content value of Xiaohongshu in the new era coordinate system, it may be clearer. Today, AI can produce a large amount of information without hesitation, but those experiences with some flaws, personal interests, real lives, and connections between people are the most precious human language corpus in the future.

This also explains why the World Cup is not just a copyright cooperation for Xiaohongshu.

39 days after the start of the World Cup, a champion will be crowned, and the event copyright will enter the next round of competition. But what remains after the traffic fades is a shared world - class event, in which more interests may be stimulated and more people may enter new connections in the community.

For Xiaohongshu today, this may be more important than the 104 matches themselves. Because what it wants to tell is never just a sports story, but a story about how the community continues to grow.