Kuaishou is growing more "small communities"
It was past 8 p.m. when Li Qingqing went live. Several JK skirts hung in front of the camera, and a bullet comment floated across: "Qingqing, the skirt I bought from you before has arrived. What's the white thread on it for?" Li Qingqing picked up the skirt and told the viewer that it was called a "positioning thread", which was used to fix the pleats and should be removed before wearing.
She has answered similar questions many times. Someone who just figured it out would be followed by a new girl coming in and asking the same question, so she would explain it all over again. Over the course of one live stream, this would happen many rounds back and forth.
In the first half of 2025, Li Qingqing posted her first JK-related video on Kuaishou, and now she has more than 2 million followers on the platform.
Her story is not built around a grand topic. Instead, she just shared a specific hobby in a sufficiently professional and consistent manner, gradually gathering a group of scattered like-minded people around her.
Similar things are happening in many corners of Kuaishou. Some people follow a grassroots basketball team from Qinghai to watch matches across the northwest; some get to know a local opera troupe they have never heard of before through a clip of Qinqiang Opera; others stay in live streaming rooms to watch others go on blind dates.
"What is the core of Kuaishou's community? Over the past 15 years, I have asked myself this question every year." At the recently held 2026 Kuaishou Light Chaser Creator Conference, Cheng Yixiao, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Kuaishou, said frankly: "In my opinion, the core of Kuaishou can be summed up in three words: equality and universal benefit, warmth and trust, and diverse characteristics."
Cheng Yixiao, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Kuaishou Technology
Looking back over the past 15 years, Kuaishou's products and community forms have been evolving continuously, but the underlying tone that supports the sustained growth of the community has never changed. At the very beginning, it allowed ordinary people to record equally and express freely; later, following, interaction and live streams made strangers gradually get familiar with and trust each other, and many relationships extended from online to offline. As more and more slices of real life are brought into the community, interests, experiences and daily moments are precipitated little by little, and the connections between people have become more specific.
Today, this change is still ongoing. The content on the platform is getting richer and richer, and users' interests have become more diverse. Centering on a common interest, a group of people who did not know each other before may gather together because of the same host, and through repeated viewing and communication, closer small communities have grown up in this way.
Let Every Interest Find Its Own Like-Minded People
In Li Qingqing's live room, terms like "pleat breaking" and "authentic vs pirated" appear very frequently. People who do not know about JK skirts may not understand them, but for girls in the circle, these terms are directly related to the workmanship, copyright and price of a skirt. Fans of folk basketball also have their own set of terms: a team, a player, and a match that is going to be held next week.
Li Qingqing, Kuaishou Creator
This kind of content may not become a topic that everyone cares about, but it can accurately respond to the needs of some people. Some come for answers, some for resonance, and some just simply enjoy it. Users who were originally scattered across different regions, ages and life backgrounds have gathered around the same interest in this way.
On Kuaishou, there are a large number of such "small communities". Data disclosed by Kuaishou shows that more than 4,000 interest tags and over 600 interest circles have emerged on the platform, among which 383 interest circles have more than 20 million daily active consumers. At the user level, each Kuaishou user follows an average of 16 different interest areas for a long time.
Content is indeed becoming more and more segmented. Under the sports category, there are local basketball and football events; in traditional culture, there are Qinqiang Opera and folk customs; under the ACG category, there are further subcategories including JK skirts, figurines and perler beads.
This is also changing the way Kuaishou judges content value. In addition to play counts, user-initiated behaviors such as searching, following, sharing and collecting have become important clues for discovering high-quality content and creators. Compared with a passive swipe, these behaviors better indicate which seemingly non-mainstream content already has a stable group of audiences.
"The right to define good content belongs to Kuaishou users," Huang Mimi, Vice President of Content Operations at Kuaishou, said at the conference. What users are willing to search for, collect, who they are willing to follow and interact with for a long time, is itself their choice of content value.
Huang Mimi, Vice President of Content Operations at Kuaishou
In Huang Mimi's definition of good content, "a sense of community" is placed in an important position. She summarizes it as "the down-to-earth warmth of Kuaishou, the human touch of neighbors, and the sense of belonging of the community".
This sense of community is not a fixed content style. A creator who is willing to continuously share their life and experiences, and users who are willing to respond in the comment section and join the mic in the live room, will over time no longer be just creators and fans, but more like neighbors living in the same community. Shared feelings bring people closer, long-term operation builds trust, and repeated interactions make the relationship last.
"The growth of community-focused creators is not the result of a single traffic boost, but long-term support, companionship and operation." To this end, Kuaishou will launch the "Kuaishou Vibe Program" in September, selecting 20,000 community-focused creators in the first batch, and assigning exclusive operations staff to each of them to provide full-cycle support from content optimization to full-domain operation of short videos and live streams, with "one operation staff following the creator all the way".
In addition to the sense of community, active behaviors such as searching, collecting and sharing are also helping the platform discover another type of content: professional content that can provide information, methods and judgments, and is still useful to users a period of time after release.
"Being professional does not mean making content more serious, nor turning short videos into courses," Huang Mimi said. "Its core is to ensure that users really gain something after watching, and that the content remains valuable over a longer period of time."
For creators who can stably produce such content, Kuaishou has also launched the "Kuaishou Premium Creator Program", which will invest 500 million yuan level of cash and 500 billion level of traffic, and support resources including activities, commercial orders and IP cooperation. Compared with rewarding a single viral hit, the platform hopes to find creators who can deeply cultivate a certain field for a long time, and help them continue to deepen their content.
This also corresponds to the direction Cheng Yixiao mentioned in his speech: "Let leading creators grow in every circle." College application guidance, folk acrobatics, ACG, local sports, and even smaller interests may give rise to such creators. They may not be known to everyone, but they are likely to be the first people that users in the circle think of when they encounter problems.
A Good Creator Can Also Be a Good Host
Last year, Kuaishou put forward the basic business philosophy of "short video and live stream integration", encouraging creators to do well in both short videos and live streams. At this year's Light Chaser Creator Conference, the two-way cycle between short videos and live streams remains the key focus emphasized by the platform: good hosts reach users outside the live room through videos, while high-quality short video creators are further encouraged to go live.
However, there is no fixed set of practices for this two-way cycle. What kind of videos are suitable for different types of content, and what roles live rooms can play, require creators to find answers according to their own characteristics. At this conference, several creators who took the stage to share also talked about how the two content forms have changed their creation.
After taking the stage, voice actor creator Gong Yangjie first consecutively imitated the voices of Sun Wukong, Yao (from Honor of Kings) and Shen Gongbao. But what he wanted to talk about was not how many different voices he could imitate, but how a personal hobby turned into content that a group of people could participate in together.
Gong Yangjie, Kuaishou Creator
During the 2025 Spring Festival, he imitated 12 characters in one go in front of the camera, the whole video was shot in one take, and its play count was close to 30 million. Later, he challenged himself to complete 100 kinds of voices in 11 and a half minutes, with no editing and no chance to redo, and this video recorded over 200 million views across all platforms.
In short videos, Gong Yangjie presents works that have been practiced repeatedly and are fully prepared. In the live room, things are far less controllable.
Fans can go directly on mic, bringing voices he has never heard before and newly popular memes. Some teach him to imitate animal calls, some challenge car engine roars, and some go on mic full of confidence only to mess up as soon as they open their mouth. Gong Yangjie calls his live room an "open practice room": he learns in it, fans also practice in it, and anyone who comes up with an interesting sound may be heard by others.
In just over a year, Gong Yangjie has published 497 videos on Kuaishou, with an average of 3.28 million views per video; he has completed 635 live streams, and about 20,000 users have ever joined the mic. For him, short videos are not simple clips cut after the live stream ends, and live streams are not just a repeat of the performance in the videos. One is suitable for spreading finished works, and the other constantly provides new voices, feedback and content.
Another creator who took the stage to share at the conference is 62-year-old Huang Runwu, also known as Fifth Brother. He served in the army for ten years, and then led middle-aged and elderly people to do aerobics for 17 years. After settling in Kuaishou in 2019, he moved the in-person aerobics teaching and training that used to be done face to face to online.
For each movement, Fifth Brother will shoot separate front, back and slow motion versions for fans to watch repeatedly; at the fixed time, he will shout out the commands in the live room, leading fans from all over the country to start exercising together.
Today, there are more than 2,000 "Dream Teams" across the country, connecting millions of aerobics fans. As Fifth Brother said in his speech: "Exercising alone is just fitness; exercising in a group is mostly about accompanying each other." Short videos leave movements that can be learned repeatedly, while live streams keep people scattered in different places sharing the same daily rhythm.
Gong Yangjie and Fifth Brother represent two different combinations. Gong Yangjie gets new content from live interactions, while Fifth Brother uses short videos to teach movements and uses live streams to lead everyone to exercise together. There is no fixed division of labor between short videos and live streams, the key is to find a more suitable cooperation method according to the content and user needs.
Huang Runwu, Kuaishou Creator
Different types of content have different priorities. Life experience and knowledge sharing spread faster through short videos, while content that values a strong sense of presence such as blind dates, local events, operas and village stage performances are more suitable for gathering people together through live streams.
Therefore, Kuaishou still encourages creators to do both well this year. Creators who are good at live streaming can continue to turn stories and problems encountered in live streams into short videos; creators who are already good at making short videos are encouraged to go live.
Judging from the results, this combination has brought more direct growth. Taking the "Good Hosts Post Good Videos" support policy as an example, from March to July 2026, high-quality hosts eligible for support saw their average exposure per video increase by 40% and net new followers increase by 41% within 2 days after posting short videos. According to Cheng Yixiao, Kuaishou will also launch a 100 billion level exclusive traffic pool this year to encourage high-quality short video creators to go live.
The Deeper the Circle, the Broader the Creator's Path
After short videos and live streams gather like-minded people together, the value of the circle also extends from content and relationships to business operations. Cheng Yixiao disclosed at the conference that on Kuaishou, creators who deeply cultivate vertical fields have a monthly income per capita 2.2 times that of general traffic creators.
This does not mean that the smaller the interest, the easier it is to make money. Instead, when a group of people focus on the same thing for a long time, what they want to watch and what they are willing to pay for will become clearer. A typical example comes from Northwest China basketball.
In July 2025, the Snow Eagle team went to Taipan, Guizhou.
This is a grassroots basketball team from Qinghai. Many of its members come from farming and herding families in Tibetan areas. Ma Bin, the person in charge of the team, described: "All my kids grew up herding cattle." Some of them had never even taken a plane before joining the team. At that year's "Village BA" national tournament, 195 grassroots teams competed for 10 days, and the Snow Eagle team finally won the championship.
At first, their records on Kuaishou were very simple: they shot training and matches casually with their mobile phones, rarely edited, and rarely went live. Later, the team began to participate in the Northwest Six Provinces Basketball Championship. Top 10 plays and key balls were edited into short videos, and the whole match was presented through live streams, with the number of concurrent viewers in the live room reaching 20,000 to 40,000.
