Leveraging World Cup traffic—Xiaohongshu wants to keep moving into sports media rights

On July 10, Xiaohongshu announced that 12 local football leagues from 12 provinces and cities—including Shanghai Street Super, Suzhou Street Super, Foshan Xi League, Chu Super, and Guizhou Cun Super—have collectively joined the platform. Xiaohongshu will provide these competitions with traffic boosts, content operations, and live-streaming support to help local leagues build their own content and fan communities on Xiaohongshu.

By shifting from global top-tier events to “right at home” local leagues, Xiaohongshu is trying to keep the viewing users gathered during the World Cup within football content and communities.

Traffic generated by sports events often shows clear periodicity. During the World Cup, users come onto the platform because of the dense match schedule; after the event ends, viewing and discussion demand may quickly drop. For platforms that buy broadcast rights and invest substantial operational resources, the real test is how many people can remain after the final whistle.

Local leagues have therefore become a step for Xiaohongshu to carry the World Cup heat. Compared with the World Cup, local leagues have relatively limited influence and commercial value, but they are closer to everyday users and can provide more continuous, diversified content supply.

More importantly, Xiaohongshu has also sent a signal that it will continue to invest in sports event broadcast rights.

On July 10, Xiaohongshu community sports and outdoors head and World Cup operations head Strawberry said in discussions with media outlets including Wall Street Insight that Xiaohongshu will continue exploring cooperation for broadcast rights of professional sports events.

As for which specific event broadcast rights Xiaohongshu will purchase next, it will take into account user research, user preferences, and the availability of resources in the copyright market.

“Everyone doesn’t need to worry that the World Cup is just a one-time investment.” Strawberry said.

Based on currently disclosed data, the World Cup has indeed accelerated the growth of multiple Xiaohongshu business metrics.

During the World Cup, the daily average volume of football content published on Xiaohongshu reached 10 times the figure before the event; the number of football posts with more than 10,000 likes was 200 times the figure before the event; the platform also saw 6,253 related trending topics.

In July, Xiaohongshu app usage time’s month-over-month growth rate increased to 2 times that of the prior period; the month-over-month growth rate of the daily number of published notes reached 3 times that of June; in interactive live-streaming scenarios, the number of long-duration viewers increased year over year by nearly 5 times.

However, continuing to explore purchasing event broadcast rights does not mean Xiaohongshu will follow the path of traditional video websites—using broadcast rights to build itself into a sports content retransmission platform. Sports events are more like a traffic entry point that attracts users.

Strawberry believes that some users downloaded Xiaohongshu because of the World Cup, but after entering the platform they started paying attention to cycling, outdoors, travel, food, and other content. By leveraging the community’s diverse interest content, Xiaohongshu hopes these newly added users will keep staying.

The continuously expanding supply of sports content may also create new opportunities for commercialization. Sports events naturally have strong brand-convergence capabilities; as more groups such as hardcore fans enter the platform, Xiaohongshu may be able to attract brands across more categories, including sports equipment, automobiles, outdoors, and travel.

Overall, for Xiaohongshu, continuing to explore sports broadcast rights is both an attempt at user growth and an effort to broaden the boundaries of monetization.

Risk warning and disclaimer

        There are risks in the market; invest cautiously. This article does not constitute personal investment advice, and it does not consider the special investment goals, financial situations, or needs of any individual user. Users should consider whether any opinions, viewpoints, or conclusions in this article meet their specific circumstances. Invest accordingly at your own risk.