What did Xiaohongshu gain from the World Cup?
Although the 2026 World Cup has concluded, it has opened a window for Xiaohongshu to tap into the "male user increment". A series of data reflects that Xiaohongshu's move to spend huge sums of money purchasing World Cup copyrights has indeed achieved an effect of breaking through its original user circle.
However, "acquiring users" is only the first step; "retaining users", converting general sports traffic into long-term active assets of a diverse community, realizing commercial monetization of users, and eliminating long-standing problems in commercialization and compliance, are the major challenges that Xiaohongshu is about to face.
If the World Cup is a prism, then what it refracts is Xiaohongshu's success in breaking through its original user circle, as well as the dilemma of user retention and capability challenges under the countdown to its listing.
01
Has Xiaohongshu's Structural Imbalance Been Remediated by the World Cup?
At 3 a.m. on July 20 in Beijing, during the World Cup final, Spain faced Argentina at the New Jersey Stadium in New York. Under the attention of football fans around the world, Spain defeated Argentina in the final, defended its title, and lifted the World Cup trophy! In a packed and excited bar, Zhang Hao posted a photo he took at that moment as a Xiaohongshu note, leaving a message: This summer has not been wasted.
Zhang Hao became a new user of Xiaohongshu this summer specifically because of the World Cup. A 39-year-old straight man and a technician at a large tech company, his user profile seems inconsistent with the typical user portrait of Xiaohongshu. Zhang Hao told the Entertainment Value Observer that due to World Cup copyright restrictions, only CCTV, Migu, and Xiaohongshu could broadcast all the matches. However, Xiaohongshu has a vibrant social and community atmosphere, coupled with the pleasant experience of instant sharing on the platform. During the World Cup, Zhang Hao opened the Xiaohongshu APP almost multiple times every day: "Either chatting about football with other netizens, watching matches, or browsing fan-made content, everything feels very smooth."
Indeed, during the World Cup, in addition to live broadcasts, Xiaohongshu also put a lot of effort into community operations. The "World Cup" entrance is clear and easy to find, and the special page is filled with various topics, lucky draws, fan-created content, recommended sports influencers, and live stream entrances. This series of settings provides users with a convenient operating experience. Xiaohongshu pins its differentiated strategy on the community ecosystem, allowing users to "watch live streams, post notes, and send bullet comments at the same time", using community stickiness to make up for its disadvantage of less in-depth commentary compared to CCTV and Migu.
A set of data shows the industry what returns Xiaohongshu has obtained from the copyright purchase that cost an estimated 1 billion yuan.
On the first day of the tournament, the number of online viewers of the World Cup live broadcasts surged 55 times compared to before the competition, breaking the historical peak of the number of concurrent live stream viewers on Xiaohongshu. During the World Cup, the average daily search volume of football content on Xiaohongshu was 3 times that of the previous World Cup, the average daily posting volume was 27 times that of the previous tournament, high-quality notes with over 10,000 likes were 200 times that before the competition, and exposure in the sports vertical category increased by 200% year-on-year. Men accounted for about 60% of the viewers during the group stage, and the proportion rose to 80% in the Round of 16. Among users who posted football content, men accounted for 56% and women 44%, almost evenly split.
Xiaohongshu also broke through its inherent age distribution during the World Cup: users over 40 years old accounted for 22.5%, slightly higher than the 21% of the 20-29 age group. The two age groups are almost equal, and the distribution across all age groups tends to be balanced.
In addition, the number of online viewers of Xiaohongshu's live broadcasts increased 55 times compared to before the competition. In the first three days, there were 90 million interactions among fans in the live streams, the number of screen-casting usage times increased by 36 times, viewership on the web page increased by 14 times, and the platform's daily active users reached 170 million. The month-on-month growth rate of APP usage duration doubled, the month-on-month growth rate of daily note postings increased by 3 times, and the number of users watching live streams for a long time increased by nearly 5 times year-on-year.
Although its commentary lineup is not as strong as the sports advantages of CCTV and Migu, with football legends such as Fan Zhiyi and Xie Hui, plus a professional commentary team of 42 people, linking up with domestic and foreign football stars and cross-border entertainers, it has created a communal and entertaining "watch and chat" atmosphere. In user interactions, Xiaohongshu generated a total of 6,253 World Cup hot topics, among which legendary football stars spawned 675 hot topics: Haaland's "eccentric" viral fame, Cape Verde's dark horse upset, and Chinese referee Ma Ning stepping onto the world stage, which triggered greater in-platform popularity.
The data proves that Xiaohongshu has indeed "obtained" a long-lost large-scale increment from breaking through its original user circle.
02
After the World Cup, How Can Xiaohongshu Retain Its New Users?
The male incremental users brought by the World Cup matches to Xiaohongshu have completely broken the platform's previous single user structure dominated by female users, becoming a key node for the platform to break through its original user circle. However, can this new influx of male users achieve long-term retention? And can they bring greater commercial conversion rates to Xiaohongshu?
From the four core dimensions of content supply, user mindset, community atmosphere, and creator ecosystem, Xiaohongshu has built a basic foundation to accommodate male users. For example, after the World Cup, Xiaohongshu further officially announced that 12 local football leagues from provinces and cities, including Shanghai Street Super League, Jiangsu Su Chao League, and Guizhou Village Super League, have collectively settled on the platform, striving to precipitate short-term event traffic into long-term community assets.
After the World Cup, it can be seen that Xiaohongshu is actively promoting male-demand content such as sports event reviews, financial analysis, digital technology, game guides, and car evaluations, trying to normalize male-oriented content. The addition of these new male users has also reversed to promote the blue ocean of the platform's content tracks, continuously empowering the creator flywheel.
Mr. Ji, a senior operation manager from a leading short video platform, revealed to the Entertainment Value Observer that in his observation, although Xiaohongshu has the basic conditions for user retention, the natural attribute of event traffic and the platform's inherent feminine tone, coupled with multiple mismatches in product logic and algorithm mechanisms, have created core obstacles to the retention of male users, making it difficult to completely break through the circle in the short term. User Zhang Hao also confessed to the Entertainment Value Observer that after the World Cup ended, he no longer opened the content pushed by Xiaohongshu.
Mr. Ji told the Entertainment Value Observer that the platform he works for has also experienced extremely strong short-term traffic surges due to large-scale sports events. But at the same time, such a surge also comes with a tidal effect of a cliff-like drop in traffic. Once the event ends and the exclusive scenario disappears, the short-term high-frequency motivation of new users who have never used the platform before will be greatly reduced. These new increments, which the industry calls "passive traffic", lack independent usage habits and have low subsequent retention willingness.
Can Xiaohongshu, which has long been deeply rooted in female aesthetics, refined lifestyles, and sharing and recommendation, achieve a balance between male and female users within the World Cup window? Mr. Ji believes that once the strategy is out of balance, not only will the new incremental male users not be retained, but also the original core female users will be alienated. When long-time users cannot obtain a pure vertical content experience, the damage to the two-way user experience will also become one of the obstacles to retention.
Taking the data of IShowSpeed during this World Cup as an example, after the same content was posted, the number of likes on Xiaohongshu was only in the hundreds or thousands; while on Douyin, it was in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. This shows that there is still a huge traffic gap between Xiaohongshu and leading platforms.
Short-term event traffic can only complete rapid user acquisition, and the real retention battle has just begun. For the platform, to accommodate this male incremental traffic and find ways to convert new users into stable core retained users is a new proposition that Xiaohongshu needs to invest energy and capital in. Although Xiaohongshu's breakthrough in acquiring male users was initiated by short-term traffic, it is a protracted war that depends on long-term product and operation capabilities to determine the outcome.
03
Countdown to Listing, What Remains to Be Done for Xiaohongshu?
This summer will definitely be a remarkable period in Xiaohongshu's history. On the one hand, it is carrying out large-scale user expansion with the momentum of the World Cup, and on the other hand, it is going all out to push for an IPO.
According to reports from multiple foreign media outlets such as Bloomberg, Xiaohongshu secretly submitted IPO prospectus materials to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at the end of June, launching the process of listing in Hong Kong. Many leading investment banks have been involved in coordinating the overall listing matters. This summer is the closest Xiaohongshu has ever been to the capital market.
Since the first rumor of its plan to IPO in the US was forced to be put on hold, Xiaohongshu's IPO journey has not been smooth. After relevant sources revealed that it restarted its listing plan in 2025, Xiaohongshu completely shut down external jump links at the end of 2025, forcing the implementation of in-platform note links and a self-owned store transaction system, completing the full-link business closed loop of "content - recommendation - transaction". With the closed loop implemented, the platform's e-commerce GMV has achieved phased rapid growth, and the autonomy of content monetization has also been greatly improved. Previously, compared with the full-domain monetization capabilities of platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou, Xiaohongshu's revenue structure was too single, belonging to a recommendation model that "worked for others".
In June 2026, Xiaohongshu set up its first overseas office in Times Square, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. This news is regarded as a signal that Xiaohongshu is accelerating its push for a Hong Kong IPO. However, on June 28, Chen Hao, Xiaohongshu's former head of direct sales for commercialization in South China, submitted a real-name compliance complaint regarding the listing to both the Listing Department of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the Securities and Futures Commission of Hong Kong. Later, he completed an online real-name report on the official platform of the China Securities Regulatory Commission. This series of reports disrupted Xiaohongshu's IPO process.
Amid the booming momentum of the World Cup, the discussion popularity of Xiaohongshu has further increased.
Against the backdrop where leading platforms in the industry have completed their listings and track competition is relatively solidified, the World Cup has become a clear growth card that Xiaohongshu must play before going public. This full investment in the World Cup is the only short-term opportunity for Xiaohongshu to boost market confidence and repair its valuation narrative. However, the drawback of this traffic window is that it is too short, and the sudden growth cannot cover up the long-standing structural problems of the platform.
Xiaohongshu has long relied on advertising as its core revenue source. In recent years, the platform's ad load rate has approached the industry ceiling, and the growth space for female-oriented recommendation ads has almost been exhausted, leading its commercial growth into a bottleneck period. While the top commercial advantage of platforms like Douyin and Kuaishou is e-commerce, Xiaohongshu started its e-commerce business relatively late and still has shortcomings in infrastructure. Whether Xiaohongshu can accommodate the male increment brought by the World Cup and whether its commercial profitability can be strengthened through this opportunity will become important bases for its subsequent listing.
Traffic is the dividend of increment, while internal capabilities are the core confidence for listing. The Entertainment Value Observer believes that the value brought by the World Cup to Xiaohongshu is currently only reflected in the surface-level