"There's a saying: In many battles throughout history, the flag that stands last is often planted at the top of the slope—precisely the starting point of a long downward descent. Xiaohongshu at the WILL Conference is like this high-gloss flag on the slope's peak. But behind the fluttering flag lies the restructuring of industry logic, a wave of commercialization decline, and most crucially—all peers have upgraded their 'combat models' through organizational transformations, while Xiaohongshu remains trapped in its old organizational framework."

As Xiaohongshu's 2025 WILL Commercial Conference came to an end, I saw many media professionals reposting related content. After chatting with a few, I found most of them were positive and excited—understandably so. Media outlets relying on commercialization have struggled in recent years. After all, commercial organizations across the industry have been integrating into operational systems with shrinking scales, making high-profile, lavish conferences like this increasingly rare.

"Seeding finally enters the performance-driven era" and "Xiaohongshu's commercialization reaches a milestone"—praise from media and analysts echoed endlessly. On stage were powerful speeches; off stage, a complete product matrix was on display. This meticulously crafted event was seen by many as the highlight of Xiaohongshu's commercialization journey. I also asked several friends at Xiaohongshu, who frankly called this year's WILL Conference the best in its history, a benchmark for the industry. Yet this conference may well have been for Xiaohongshu itself—intended to boost internal confidence and cohesion.

But behind this excitement, the contrast with the industry context is more noteworthy: this is Xiaohongshu's fourth consecutive WILL Commercial Conference, while commercial conferences of similar platforms have long fallen quiet. The last time Kuaishou held its Magnetic Conference was back in March 2025, which garnered little industry attention. ByteDance's Jumiao Engine hasn't hosted a commercial conference in a full two years; amid repeated splits and integration of its commercial middle platform into the operational side, the industry widely speculates it will likely not restart such events. Alibaba's M Summit has similarly faded from view—the last one was in October 2023, after which it was officially discontinued. Tencent's specialized commercial conferences have long been dormant; the most recent large-scale publicly recorded event related to commercialization was its annual employee conference focusing on company-wide strategy, not an industry conference for commercialization.

This is precisely the most intriguing mirror of the times: while the entire industry is scaling back its external commercialization rhetoric, Xiaohongshu is defiantly raising its profile. A core question arises: at a time when major platforms are downplaying their commercial presence and shifting to low-key operations, why is Xiaohongshu going against the grain, exuding a distinctly different external influence and momentum?

I. Industry Shifts to Operations—Organizational Restructuring Is a Must-Answer Question, and Leading Platforms Have Already Submitted Their Papers

In recent years, the transformation trend of internet platforms has become increasingly clear: Douyin has promoted in-depth integration of operations and marketing across products, operations, accounts, and tools, bidding farewell to the old model of separated advertising and operations; Tencent integrated WeChat Work, Mini Programs, and Payments to build an "operation middle platform"; Kuaishou deeply merged its local life services and commercialization departments to achieve full linkage between marketing tools and merchant operation accounts; Bilibili is also promoting collaboration between commercialization and content operations, building an end-to-end data tracking system. These transformations are not accidental choices but inevitable evolutions through mutual learning among platforms—after the exhaustion of traffic dividends, the soil for "selling traffic for quick money" has long been barren. Coupled with the general slowdown or decline of commercialization across the industry, the "traffic-selling" model is already at a dead end.

In the early years, with rapid internet user growth, platforms held a steady stream of new traffic and could easily profit by selling it to merchants—this was exactly the logic behind Baidu's rise through "keyword bidding." But when user growth peaked, merchants in the stock market gradually discovered: the cost of buying traffic kept rising, yet stable repeat purchases remained elusive. This one-time marketing model was simply unsustainable. The shift in merchant needs forced platforms to upgrade their business models—from "helping merchants buy exposure" to "helping merchants run complete businesses." The core solution to this upgrade lies in in-depth organizational restructuring. All successfully transformed platforms have proven that product upgrades are only superficial; adapting organizational capabilities is the key. Those who failed to transform precisely missed this point.

Today, the organizational transformations of leading platforms have entered the "deep water zone," with a highly consistent core goal: to completely break the separation between commercialization and operational businesses, forming a closed loop of advertising, e-commerce, and local life services, and truly being responsible for merchants' long-term operational value. These implemented cases further highlight Xiaohongshu's delayed rhythm.

Tencent's transformation has long surpassed the initial integration of its Smart Retail Business Unit in 2018. In 2025, it completed the "operational transformation" of its advertising business: fully merging the previously independent commercial marketing department into the operational system, completely abandoning the old model of "prioritizing exposure over results." The core goal is to embed the commercialization team deeply into the merchant operation chain, providing support throughout the entire process from user reach and conversion to repeat purchases and retention. This adjustment directly brought performance dividends—Tencent Advertising has achieved double-digit growth for 11 consecutive quarters, with marketing revenue from Video Accounts and Search surging by over 50%. As a former Tencent executive put it: "When people from commercial marketing start following operational teams to pursue merchant repeat purchases instead of just doing brand promotions, they truly align with the rhythm of operations."

ByteDance's 2025 "deconstruction and restructuring" of Jumiao Engine was every step aimed at the core of "operational collaboration." At the beginning of the year, it stripped the product and operational teams of Juchuan and Local Push from the commercialization department, placing them under Douyin E-commerce and Local Life Services respectively—resolving the dual-track separation of "advertising selling traffic and business driving conversion." In November, it took a further step: integrating the engineering and technology teams of China E-commerce, Local Life Services, and Advertising into the "China Transactions and Advertising" department, while splitting the unified commercial marketing division to allow marketing resources to accurately match different operational scenarios. The underlying logic of this series of actions is to build an "operational community," avoiding internal friction between technology, marketing, and business, and ultimately achieving in-depth collaboration between advertising and transactions.

As an industry follower, Kuaishou also followed ByteDance's footsteps to complete key integrations: merging its local life services and commercialization departments on a large scale, replicating the "advertising + business" collaboration model. This allows the commercialization team to no longer sell traffic in isolation but deeply participate in the full-link operations of local merchants' store visits and redemption. Kuaishou's follow-up precisely confirms that "organizational restructuring to adapt to operational needs" has become an industry consensus—against the backdrop of exhausted traffic dividends and declining commercialization, only by deeply embedding commercialization into operational scenarios can platforms retain merchants and stabilize revenue.

II. Xiaohongshu's Evolution Path: From C-end Bottlenecks to Commercialization Trial-and-Error Dilemma

After understanding the logic of the industry's collective evolution, examining Xiaohongshu's development path reveals the root cause of its rhythmic differences: in recent years, it has been exploring commercialization in the gap between "breaking C-end growth bottlenecks" and "balancing community ecology," yet it has never entered the deep operational cycle generally adopted by the industry. Instead, it remains in the peak period of proving commercial value. This lag is hidden in repeated business trials and long-term organizational deficiencies.

Xiaohongshu's commercialization exploration began with the practical pressure of stagnant C-end DAU growth. When user scale shifted from high-speed growth to a stable period, the model of monetizing community traffic alone became unsustainable, making it inevitable to release commercial value. E-commerce was its first core track for exploration. From launching "account-store integration" in 2019 to encourage creators to sell goods, to opening external links in 2023 to cooperate with Taobao and JD.com on projects like "Red Cat Plan" and "Red JD Plan," and now achieving a GMV exceeding 400 billion yuan, Xiaohongshu's attempts in e-commerce have never stopped—yet it remains trapped in the dilemma of "easy seeding, difficult conversion." Behind this strategic repetition lies the ongoing conflict between community genes and commercial ambitions: tightening commercial content reviews to maintain community tone cools merchants' enthusiasm for joining; relaxing standards leads to an flood of marketing notes that erode user trust, ultimately falling into the dilemma of "commercialization harms the community, while protecting the community hinders monetization."

Beyond e-commerce, local life has become another important exploration direction for Xiaohongshu's commercialization, but it has similarly fallen victim to failed trials. The local life membership product "Xiaohong Card" launched in September 2025 attempted to connect the full-link closed loop of "content exposure—store visits—note feedback" with a "168 yuan annual fee + 10% discount," yet it was suspended after only two months of trial operation. Partner merchants in pilot cities like Shanghai and Hangzhou generally faced sluggish order volumes; a café generated only 20 related orders in two months, with revenue less than a fraction of its daily turnover. The hasty end of Xiaohong Card exposed the core shortcoming of its new business exploration: it can only create short-term hype through content marketing, but lacks long-term operational capabilities to support it—neither sufficient supply chain bargaining power to back up attractive benefits, nor a sound system for traffic undertaking and merchant management, ultimately reducing the closed-loop experiment to empty talk.

After discussing so much about Xiaohongshu's commercialization trial-and-error dilemma, let's look back at this WILL Conference, hailed internally as the "best in history"—there's actually not much worth remembering. The conference repeatedly emphasized that "seeding has entered the performance-driven era" and "seeing specific people," highlighting key directions such as emotional research, direct seeding links, and first-party data cooperation, attempting to prove to the outside world that it can solve the industry pain point of "easy seeding, difficult conversion." But combined with Xiaohongshu's dilemmas mentioned earlier, these statements are more like accurate responses to its own shortcomings: previously trapped in e-commerce transformation and conversion difficulties, it now focuses on "performance-driven"; lacking insight into user needs in local life exploration, it emphasizes "understanding specific people" and emotional analysis.

What's truly memorable is never these seemingly glamorous concepts, but the contradictions behind them—it tries to use a set of commercial slogans to cover up the aforementioned failed business trials and operational shortcomings. This conference is more like a precise "value verification" rather than a real breakthrough solution.

III. Core Disconnection: Organizational Lag Drags Down Commercial Transformation

Compared to frequent business trials, Xiaohongshu's organizational restructuring is even more delayed—this is the key reason it has failed to enter the deep operational cycle. Throughout its commercialization process, it has never broken the fragmented structure where "commercialization, content review, and e-commerce operations belong to different business groups," with completely independent KPIs for each department: the commercialization team focuses on advertising revenue, the content team on review pass rates, and the e-commerce team on GMV. Yet no single team is responsible for the core operational goal of "whether merchants can make money on Xiaohongshu."

The inefficient collaboration caused by this organizational disconnection is particularly evident in advancing full-link businesses: merchants conducting "seeding + conversion" activities need to coordinate with multiple departments, resulting in lengthy approval processes that take far longer than peers like Douyin. More crucially, team capabilities are also unable to adapt to operational transformation needs—among the core commercialization team, the proportion of members with full-link e-commerce operational experience is relatively low, significantly lagging behind the industry average. This leads to an awkward outcome: while Douyin's commercialization team can accurately predict business district sales fluctuations and help merchants prepare inventory in advance, Xiaohongshu's team is still debating "what constitutes an effective seeding note."

Business trials come first, organizational adjustments are absent—this model is destined to keep Xiaohongshu trapped in the stage of simply proving commercial value, unable to enter the deep cycle of "achieving long-term growth through operational closed loops." When the industry is binding merchant operational results through organizational restructuring, even though Xiaohongshu's launched "1+3 product matrix" shouts slogans like "performance-driven and operational," it struggles to land due to insufficient organizational support, ultimately making the high-profile WILL Conference more like a "value verification."

IV. Chain Reaction: Organizational Dilemma Consumes Core Trust Assets

More dangerously, this organizational dilemma is continuously consuming Xiaohongshu's most core moat—user trust. Xiaohongshu's greatest advantage lies in its "active decision-making scenarios": 70% of its monthly active users conduct active searches, and 88% of these searches are driven by clear needs, such as "what milk powder to buy for pregnancy" or "what wood to choose for renovations." In such high-decision-cost scenarios, users rely heavily on the platform's "authenticity and credibility"—this is the core reason its seeding conversion efficiency leads the industry.

But trust is also the most fragile asset. Survey data from 2023 to 2025 shows that the proportion of users who believe Xiaohongshu's "content is authentic and credible" has plummeted from 76% to 41%; more critically, commercial content now accounts for 28% of the platform—exceeding the 23% safety threshold identified by Harvard Business School research. Behind this is ultimately an organizational issue: when the commercialization team's only KPI is advertising revenue and the content team's KPI focuses on review efficiency, an imbalance is inevitable—"more and more commercial content, fewer and fewer authentic content." The commercialization team continuously increases exposure of commercial notes to meet revenue targets, while the content team lacks the capacity to carefully distinguish between "soft ads" and "authentic sharing," ultimately leading to the gradual erosion of user trust.

V. At the Top of the Slope: A Turning Point or the Start of a Descent?

At this moment, Xiaohongshu is indeed at a seemingly glorious peak: achieving consecutive profitable years for the first time, with a valuation exceeding 50 billion US dollars, monthly active users climbing to 260 million, and the heated discussions at the WILL Conference letting the outside world see its "commercialization determination." But historical patterns always repeat: the most dangerous moment is never the trough, but the instant you stand at the peak—the scenery at the top easily makes people mistake it for the finish line, while ignoring the steepness of the long descent behind.

Looking back at industry development, a common pattern emerges: when a platform's development rhythm disconnects from industry trends, its glory often hides hidden worries. The twists and turns in the development of Baidu and Weibo in the early years were essentially due to their failure to adapt to industry changes in a timely manner. Xiaohongshu's current situation is more challenging than theirs—back then, the industry was still in an overall growth cycle, giving platforms room for adjustment even if they lagged behind. But now, commercialization is generally contracting across the industry, and all leading players are streamlining collaboration and focusing on operations through organizational transformations to "survive the winter." Precisely at such a juncture, Xiaohongshu remains in the stage of proving commercial value with the organizational shortcoming of "departmental fragmentation and low efficiency," forming a stark disconnect from peers' in-depth operational transformations. This capability mismatch during the industry contraction period greatly increases the uncertainty of its future development.

For Xiaohongshu, this is by no means a time to stop and celebrate, but a crucial turning point requiring urgent transformation. It must quickly accomplish three core tasks: restructure its organizational architecture, connect data links, and balance the ecological relationship between the community and commerce. Among these, organizational restructuring is the foundation—after all, the root cause of the previous trust erosion lies in the imbalance between commerce and the community caused by organizational fragmentation. Only by first streamlining organizational collaboration can commercial content and authentic community content coexist harmoniously, rebuilding users' trust in the platform. If commercialization, content, and e-commerce continue to operate in silos, even the best product matrix will remain "on paper."

Moreover, the path Xiaohongshu needs to take is more difficult than that of Tencent and ByteDance: other platforms only need to optimize "how to sell more," while Xiaohongshu must solve the core proposition of "how to make users' purchases more valuable and content more credible." This requires the entire organization to completely shift from "traffic thinking" to "trust + operational thinking"—a comprehensive evolution at the mindset level.

There's a saying: In many battles throughout history, the flag that stands last is often planted at the top of the slope—precisely the starting point of a long downward descent. Xiaohongshu at the WILL Conference is like this high-gloss flag on the slope's peak. But behind the fluttering flag lies the restructuring of industry logic, a wave of commercialization decline, and most crucially—all peers have upgraded their 'combat models' through organizational transformations, while Xiaohongshu remains trapped in its old organizational framework.

What was then may well be what is now.

"There's a saying: In many battles throughout history, the flag that stands last is often planted at the top of the slope—precisely the starting point of a long downward descent. Xiaohongshu at the WILL Conference is like this high-gloss flag on the slope's peak. But behind the fluttering flag lies the restructuring of industry logic, a wave of commercialization decline, and most crucially—all peers have upgraded their 'combat models' through organizational transformations, while Xiaohongshu remains trapped in its old organizational framework."

As Xiaohongshu's 2025 WILL Commercial Conference came to an end, I saw many media professionals reposting related content. After chatting with a few, I found most of them were positive and excited—understandably so. Media outlets relying on commercialization have struggled in recent years. After all, commercial organizations across the industry have been integrating into operational systems with shrinking scales, making high-profile, lavish conferences like this increasingly rare.

"Seeding finally enters the performance-driven era" and "Xiaohongshu's commercialization reaches a milestone"—praise from media and analysts echoed endlessly. On stage were powerful speeches; off stage, a complete product matrix was on display. This meticulously crafted event was seen by many as the highlight of Xiaohongshu's commercialization journey. I also asked several friends at Xiaohongshu, who frankly called this year's WILL Conference the best in its history, a benchmark for the industry. Yet this conference may well have been for Xiaohongshu itself—intended to boost internal confidence and cohesion.

But behind this excitement, the contrast with the industry context is more noteworthy: this is Xiaohongshu's fourth consecutive WILL Commercial Conference, while commercial conferences of similar platforms have long fallen quiet. The last time Kuaishou held its Magnetic Conference was back in March 2025, which garnered little industry attention. ByteDance's Jumiao Engine hasn't hosted a commercial conference in a full two years; amid repeated splits and integration of its commercial middle platform into the operational side, the industry widely speculates it will likely not restart such events. Alibaba's M Summit has similarly faded from view—the last one was in October 2023, after which it was officially discontinued. Tencent's specialized commercial conferences have long been dormant; the most recent large-scale publicly recorded event related to commercialization was its annual employee conference focusing on company-wide strategy, not an industry conference for commercialization.

This is precisely the most intriguing mirror of the times: while the entire industry is scaling back its external commercialization rhetoric, Xiaohongshu is defiantly raising its profile. A core question arises: at a time when major platforms are downplaying their commercial presence and shifting to low-key operations, why is Xiaohongshu going against the grain, exuding a distinctly different external influence and momentum?

I. Industry Shifts to Operations—Organizational Restructuring Is a Must-Answer Question, and Leading Platforms Have Already Submitted Their Papers

In recent years, the transformation trend of internet platforms has become increasingly clear: Douyin has promoted in-depth integration of operations and marketing across products, operations, accounts, and tools, bidding farewell to the old model of separated advertising and operations; Tencent integrated WeChat Work, Mini Programs, and Payments to build an "operation middle platform"; Kuaishou deeply merged its local life services and commercialization departments to achieve full linkage between marketing tools and merchant operation accounts; Bilibili is also promoting collaboration between commercialization and content operations, building an end-to-end data tracking system. These transformations are not accidental choices but inevitable evolutions through mutual learning among platforms—after the exhaustion of traffic dividends, the soil for "selling traffic for quick money" has long been barren. Coupled with the general slowdown or decline of commercialization across the industry, the "traffic-selling" model is already at a dead end.

In the early years, with rapid internet user growth, platforms held a steady stream of new traffic and could easily profit by selling it to merchants—this was exactly the logic behind Baidu's rise through "keyword bidding." But when user growth peaked, merchants in the stock market gradually discovered: the cost of buying traffic kept rising, yet stable repeat purchases remained elusive. This one-time marketing model was simply unsustainable. The shift in merchant needs forced platforms to upgrade their business models—from "helping merchants buy exposure" to "helping merchants run complete businesses." The core solution to this upgrade lies in in-depth organizational restructuring. All successfully transformed platforms have proven that product upgrades are only superficial; adapting organizational capabilities is the key. Those who failed to transform precisely missed this point.

Today, the organizational transformations of leading platforms have entered the "deep water zone," with a highly consistent core goal: to completely break the separation between commercialization and operational businesses, forming a closed loop of advertising, e-commerce, and local life services, and truly being responsible for merchants' long-term operational value. These implemented cases further highlight Xiaohongshu's delayed rhythm.

Tencent's transformation has long surpassed the initial integration of its Smart Retail Business Unit in 2018. In 2025, it completed the "operational transformation" of its advertising business: fully merging the previously independent commercial marketing department into the operational system, completely abandoning the old model of "prioritizing exposure over results." The core goal is to embed the commercialization team deeply into the merchant operation chain, providing support throughout the entire process from user reach and conversion to repeat purchases and retention. This adjustment directly brought performance dividends—Tencent Advertising has achieved double-digit growth for 11 consecutive quarters, with marketing revenue from Video Accounts and Search surging by over 50%. As a former Tencent executive put it: "When people from commercial marketing start following operational teams to pursue merchant repeat purchases instead of just doing brand promotions, they truly align with the rhythm of operations."

ByteDance's 2025 "deconstruction and restructuring" of Jumiao Engine was every step aimed at the core of "operational collaboration." At the beginning of the year, it stripped the product and operational teams of Juchuan and Local Push from the commercialization department, placing them under Douyin E-commerce and Local Life Services respectively—resolving the dual-track separation of "advertising selling traffic and business driving conversion." In November, it took a further step: integrating the engineering and technology teams of China E-commerce, Local Life Services, and Advertising into the "China Transactions and Advertising" department, while splitting the unified commercial marketing division to allow marketing resources to accurately match different operational scenarios. The underlying logic of this series of actions is to build an "operational community," avoiding internal friction between technology, marketing, and business, and ultimately achieving in-depth collaboration between advertising and transactions.

As an industry follower, Kuaishou also followed ByteDance's footsteps to complete key integrations: merging its local life services and commercialization departments on a large scale, replicating the "advertising + business" collaboration model. This allows the commercialization team to no longer sell traffic in isolation but deeply participate in the full-link operations of local merchants' store visits and redemption. Kuaishou's follow-up precisely confirms that "organizational restructuring to adapt to operational needs" has become an industry consensus—against the backdrop of exhausted traffic dividends and declining commercialization, only by deeply embedding commercialization into operational scenarios can platforms retain merchants and stabilize revenue.

II. Xiaohongshu's Evolution Path: From C-end Bottlenecks to Commercialization Trial-and-Error Dilemma

After understanding the logic of the industry's collective evolution, examining Xiaohongshu's development path reveals the root cause of its rhythmic differences: in recent years, it has been exploring commercialization in the gap between "breaking C-end growth bottlenecks" and "balancing community ecology," yet it has never entered the deep operational cycle generally adopted by the industry. Instead, it remains in the peak period of proving commercial value. This lag is hidden in repeated business trials and long-term organizational deficiencies.

Xiaohongshu's commercialization exploration began with the practical pressure of stagnant C-end DAU growth. When user scale shifted from high-speed growth to a stable period, the model of monetizing community traffic alone became unsustainable, making it inevitable to release commercial value. E-commerce was its first core track for exploration. From launching "account-store integration" in 2019 to encourage creators to sell goods, to opening external links in 2023 to cooperate with Taobao and JD.com on projects like "Red Cat Plan" and "Red JD Plan," and now achieving a GMV exceeding 400 billion yuan, Xiaohongshu's attempts in e-commerce have never stopped—yet it remains trapped in the dilemma of "easy seeding, difficult conversion." Behind this strategic repetition lies the ongoing conflict between community genes and commercial ambitions: tightening commercial content reviews to maintain community tone cools merchants' enthusiasm for joining; relaxing standards leads to an flood of marketing notes that erode user trust, ultimately falling into the dilemma of "commercialization harms the community, while protecting the community hinders monetization."

Beyond e-commerce, local life has become another important exploration direction for Xiaohongshu's commercialization, but it has similarly fallen victim to failed trials. The local life membership product "Xiaohong Card" launched in September 2025 attempted to connect the full-link closed loop of "content exposure—store visits—note feedback" with a "168 yuan annual fee + 10% discount," yet it was suspended after only two months of trial operation. Partner merchants in pilot cities like Shanghai and Hangzhou generally faced sluggish order volumes; a café generated only 20 related orders in two months, with revenue less than a fraction of its daily turnover. The hasty end of Xiaohong Card exposed the core shortcoming of its new business exploration: it can only create short-term hype through content marketing, but lacks long-term operational capabilities to support it—neither sufficient supply chain bargaining power to back up attractive benefits, nor a sound system for traffic undertaking and merchant management, ultimately reducing the closed-loop experiment to empty talk.

After discussing so much about Xiaohongshu's commercialization trial-and-error dilemma, let's look back at this WILL Conference, hailed internally as the "best in history"—there's actually not much worth remembering. The conference repeatedly emphasized that "seeding has entered the performance-driven era" and "seeing specific people," highlighting key directions such as emotional research, direct seeding links, and first-party data cooperation, attempting to prove to the outside world that it can solve the industry pain point of "easy seeding, difficult conversion." But combined with Xiaohongshu's dilemmas mentioned earlier, these statements are more like accurate responses to its own shortcomings: previously trapped in e-commerce transformation and conversion difficulties, it now focuses on "performance-driven"; lacking insight into user needs in local life exploration, it emphasizes "understanding specific people" and emotional analysis.

What's truly memorable is never these seemingly glamorous concepts, but the contradictions behind them—it tries to use a set of commercial slogans to cover up the aforementioned failed business trials and operational shortcomings. This conference is more like a precise "value verification" rather than a real breakthrough solution.

III. Core Disconnection: Organizational Lag Drags Down Commercial Transformation

Compared to frequent business trials, Xiaohongshu's organizational restructuring is even more delayed—this is the key reason it has failed to enter the deep operational cycle. Throughout its commercialization process, it has never broken the fragmented structure where "commercialization, content review, and e-commerce operations belong to different business groups," with completely independent KPIs for each department: the commercialization team focuses on advertising revenue, the content team on review pass rates, and the e-commerce team on GMV. Yet no single team is responsible for the core operational goal of "whether merchants can make money on Xiaohongshu."

The inefficient collaboration caused by this organizational disconnection is particularly evident in advancing full-link businesses: merchants conducting "seeding + conversion" activities need to coordinate with multiple departments, resulting in lengthy approval processes that take far longer than peers like Douyin. More crucially, team capabilities are also unable to adapt to operational transformation needs—among the core commercialization team, the proportion of members with full-link e-commerce operational experience is relatively low, significantly lagging behind the industry average. This leads to an awkward outcome: while Douyin's commercialization team can accurately predict business district sales fluctuations and help merchants prepare inventory in advance, Xiaohongshu's team is still debating "what constitutes an effective seeding note."

Business trials come first, organizational adjustments are absent—this model is destined to keep Xiaohongshu trapped in the stage of simply proving commercial value, unable to enter the deep cycle of "achieving long-term growth through operational closed loops." When the industry is binding merchant operational results through organizational restructuring, even though Xiaohongshu's launched "1+3 product matrix" shouts slogans like "performance-driven and operational," it struggles to land due to insufficient organizational support, ultimately making the high-profile WILL Conference more like a "value verification."

IV. Chain Reaction: Organizational Dilemma Consumes Core Trust Assets

More dangerously, this organizational dilemma is continuously consuming Xiaohongshu's most core moat—user trust. Xiaohongshu's greatest advantage lies in its "active decision-making scenarios": 70% of its monthly active users conduct active searches, and 88% of these searches are driven by clear needs, such as "what milk powder to buy for pregnancy" or "what wood to choose for renovations." In such high-decision-cost scenarios, users rely heavily on the platform's "authenticity and credibility"—this is the core reason its seeding conversion efficiency leads the industry.

But trust is also the most fragile asset. Survey data from 2023 to 2025 shows that the proportion of users who believe Xiaohongshu's "content is authentic and credible" has plummeted from 76% to 41%; more critically, commercial content now accounts for 28% of the platform—exceeding the 23% safety threshold identified by Harvard Business School research. Behind this is ultimately an organizational issue: when the commercialization team's only KPI is advertising revenue and the content team's KPI focuses on review efficiency, an imbalance is inevitable—"more and more commercial content, fewer and fewer authentic content." The commercialization team continuously increases exposure of commercial notes to meet revenue targets, while the content team lacks the capacity to carefully distinguish between "soft ads" and "authentic sharing," ultimately leading to the gradual erosion of user trust.

V. At the Top of the Slope: A Turning Point or the Start of a Descent?

At this moment, Xiaohongshu is indeed at a seemingly glorious peak: achieving consecutive profitable years for the first time, with a valuation exceeding 50 billion US dollars, monthly active users climbing to 260 million, and the heated discussions at the WILL Conference letting the outside world see its "commercialization determination." But historical patterns always repeat: the most dangerous moment is never the trough, but the instant you stand at the peak—the scenery at the top easily makes people mistake it for the finish line, while ignoring the steepness of the long descent behind.

Looking back at industry development, a common pattern emerges: when a platform's development rhythm disconnects from industry trends, its glory often hides hidden worries. The twists and turns in the development of Baidu and Weibo in the early years were essentially due to their failure to adapt to industry changes in a timely manner. Xiaohongshu's current situation is more challenging than theirs—back then, the industry was still in an overall growth cycle, giving platforms room for adjustment even if they lagged behind. But now, commercialization is generally contracting across the industry, and all leading players are streamlining collaboration and focusing on operations through organizational transformations to "survive the winter." Precisely at such a juncture, Xiaohongshu remains in the stage of proving commercial value with the organizational shortcoming of "departmental fragmentation and low efficiency," forming a stark disconnect from peers' in-depth operational transformations. This capability mismatch during the industry contraction period greatly increases the uncertainty of its future development.

For Xiaohongshu, this is by no means a time to stop and celebrate, but a crucial turning point requiring urgent transformation. It must quickly accomplish three core tasks: restructure its organizational architecture, connect data links, and balance the ecological relationship between the community and commerce. Among these, organizational restructuring is the foundation—after all, the root cause of the previous trust erosion lies in the imbalance between commerce and the community caused by organizational fragmentation. Only by first streamlining organizational collaboration can commercial content and authentic community content coexist harmoniously, rebuilding users' trust in the platform. If commercialization, content, and e-commerce continue to operate in silos, even the best product matrix will remain "on paper."

Moreover, the path Xiaohongshu needs to take is more difficult than that of Tencent and ByteDance: other platforms only need to optimize "how to sell more," while Xiaohongshu must solve the core proposition of "how to make users' purchases more valuable and content more credible." This requires the entire organization to completely shift from "traffic thinking" to "trust + operational thinking"—a comprehensive evolution at the mindset level.

There's a saying: In many battles throughout history, the flag that stands last is often planted at the top of the slope—precisely the starting point of a long downward descent. Xiaohongshu at the WILL Conference is like this high-gloss flag on the slope's peak. But behind the fluttering flag lies the restructuring of industry logic, a wave of commercialization decline, and most crucially—all peers have upgraded their 'combat models' through organizational transformations, while Xiaohongshu remains trapped in its old organizational framework.

What was then may well be what is now.