In overseas markets, ByteDance is creating another "Xiaohongshu".

Written by Lan Jie

Edited by Qiao Qian

Jess Ling, a 35-year-old living in Malaysia, apart from her daily administrative work, she is also a blogger on Lemon8. In her opinion, Lemon8 has a significant traffic volume and is suitable for beginners.

Jess Ling is quite relaxed. She doesn't update frequently on Lemon8. Sometimes she only posts one post (equivalent to a "note" on Xiaohongshu) in a month. Jess Ling, who has fewer than 1000 fans, previously could generally get an exposure of more than 100 for a single note. But during the period from September 28 to October 4, after not having updated for more than a month, the exposure of a single note on Lemon8 reached more than 1700.

Jess Ling, who is also a blogger on some other similar content platforms, told 36Kr that if she doesn't keep updating, it would be difficult to obtain such a high exposure.

From Southeast Asia to Europe and the United States, Lemon8 is becoming a new traffic blue ocean for creators.

Lemon8 is an App under ByteDance that mainly features graphics, text, and short videos. It adopts a double-column information flow design, and platform users can share their lives on it. Due to its main color being yellow and having a very similar positioning and UI design to Xiaohongshu, Lemon8 is also called "Little Yellow Book" by netizens.

According to Diandian Data, in the past month, on the iPhone side in the US region, Lemon8 has almost always ranked first in the lifestyle category App, and its ranking in the overall list is mostly within the top 30. Although it is not a huge hit yet, its achievements cannot be ignored.

Bunny, who does local marketing in the US, said that due to the low cost of creation and the fact that the model of Xiaohongshu has been verified in the domestic market, "When Lemon8 is brought to the US, it can achieve a dimensionality reduction attack". He has already started to make arrangements.

Why is the traffic of Lemon8 considerable?

Having local users as the main audience and the content created by locals is one of the important reasons why Lemon8 is popular.

Nini, a Malaysian with a distinct Southeast Asian accent, is familiar with some popular words on Xiaohongshu and Douyin, such as "Jimei" and "薅羊毛" (literally "pull wool", meaning to take advantage of discounts or promotions). At the same time, she, who plays Lemon8 and TikTok, also uses some popular local network words, such as "Gou Li", which she explains means "amazing". She uses such words to describe the content of the "Little Yellow Book".

Nini is a loyal user of Lemon8 and thinks that Lemon8 is very international, mainly in English and Malay. "Thais, Indonesians, and Malaysians are all playing it". And she often reads some bloggers' sharing of cheap and good things, as well as gossip, food, travel guides, and so on.

Endia, an American blogger on Lemon8 with more than 10,000 fans, said when exchanging creative experience with another blogger that content related to skin care and makeup is very popular on the local platform.

In addition, both Jess Ling and Nini praised Lemon8's creative template as exquisite, convenient, and stylish, "very Instagram-like". In November last year, Lemon8 also launched an AI photo studio with functions such as facial analysis, skin detection, body shape assessment, and idea notebook, used for attracting new female users.

But if this is all, it is not enough to explain why it can gain a foothold among a number of local and overseas community products.

When sharing creative experience, Jess Ling said that the reason why Lemon8 has such a good traffic is that TikTok deserves the credit. She said, "The notes of Lemon8 can be directly posted to TikTok."

There is indeed a one-click sharing function set between TikTok and Lemon. TikTok also allows creators to add the account link of Lemon8 on their personal homepage for drainage. Similarly, the same setting is also available on Lemon8. In addition, the For You page of TikTok also has a large amount of promotional information of Lemon8. The view count of the "#Lemon8" topic on the platform has reached more than 4 billion, not to mention that many popular figures on TikTok have also been invited to settle in Lemon8.

To some extent, TikTok is the traffic generator of Lemon8.

In addition, the significant growth in the download volume of Lemon8 is closely related to its recent investment behavior.

According to the mobile advertising intelligence analysis platform App Growing, the average daily advertising投放数 of Lemon 8 in October this year is more than three times that of the same period last year. In addition, many users who have used Lemon8 have reported to 36Kr that they have seen Lemon8's advertisements on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook many times.

Just as Zhuang Minghao, a TMT industry investor and the host of "Dragon Slaying Technique", observed about Lemon8 on Jike, "It seems that we can guess that in the recent period, the project team may have obtained some investment quotas for the US market from the management again periodically."

According to Data.ai data, Lemon8 has accumulated more than 56.1 million overseas user downloads. As of September this year, Thailand is the largest source of active users for Lemon8, with an active user proportion of 36.18%, followed by the United States, with a proportion of 22.13%. Users from Southeast Asian countries have brought a lot of activity to the platform, while American users are the new user growth engine of the platform.

Learning from Xiaohongshu and Surpassing It?

Why is Lemon8, which is so similar to Xiaohongshu, not from the hands of Xiaohongshu?

In fact, Xiaohongshu has many overseas products. It launched Uniik for the Japanese market in February 2021, Spark for the Southeast Asian market in April 2022, and Catalog, a home-sharing community for the European and American markets in November 2022. The content and UI design are similar to Xiaohongshu.

Jae was responsible for the strategic planning and product design of Xiaohongshu's overseas product Spark from 2022 to 2023 and witnessed the birth and decline of this App. She told 36Kr that in March this year, a new product similar to Dianping that Xiaohongshu launched overseas, s'more, has been handed over to an outsourcing team to do.

Now when it comes to Lemon8, Jae, who has been away from the job for almost two years, still feels angry. She and her former colleagues call Lemon8 a "copy cat", which literally means a copier.

Turning back the clock to three years ago, Jae only felt a sense of crisis about Lemon8 in the early stage of her employment because "it was done first". But later, Jae and the team were more focused on replicating the domestic model of Xiaohongshu to the overseas products. From the current results, the overseas Apps of Xiaohongshu and Lemon8 have not even had the opportunity to confront each other directly.

However, Xiaohongshu's overseas products have a potential learning object - TikTok.

According to Jae's recollection, in the product team she was in at that time, there were four product managers, one of whom came from TikTok. In addition, many programmers also came from ByteDance - in Xiaohongshu's overseas planning, it wanted to learn some things that ByteDance is good at, such as live-streaming e-commerce.

For TikTok, Lemon8 is not so much a replacement as a supplement to absorb those users and traffic that TikTok cannot cover.

Compared with Lemon8's aggressive posture of leveraging TikTok, investing heavily in traffic, and blatantly borrowing the Xiaohongshu model, Xiaohongshu's overseas expansion appears to be very low-key. So much so that when Spark was launched, netizens did not believe it was Xiaohongshu's product and even thought it was a pirated version. In addition, Jae can also recall many reasons for Xiaohongshu's unfavorable overseas expansion, including the not deeply localized team, the wavering goals, and so on.

Everyone knows the later story. Among Xiaohongshu's overseas Apps, Uniik has stopped updating in less than a year, and Spark is facing a serious problem of creator retention and is gradually being forgotten by users. And Lemon8 has successfully established itself in Southeast Asia and even Europe and the United States using Xiaohongshu's "magic".

However, Xiaohongshu's overseas expansion still leaves a few "sparks" - the usage rate of Xiaohongshu among overseas Chinese is very high. Currently, the known data is that in 2022, 1.5 million Chinese in Malaysia used Xiaohongshu. Jae also shared a case where she knew a blogger who was originally an international student. After starting work, she began to do Xiaohongshu and now works full-time to receive commercial orders, with an annual income of up to one million yuan.

And whether Lemon8 can become the next TikTok is still uncertain. After all, it is still facing competition from Instagram, which has more than a billion users worldwide.

Lemon8, on the crest of the traffic wave, needs time to prove that it is not a flash in the pan.