China’s Instagram Meets the World Cup

01 / THE SHELTER

The first migration faded by day four.

When American TikTok users rushed into RedNote in early 2025, many of them thought they had found a temporary shelter.

They called themselves TikTok refugees. They arrived with jokes, selfies, translation screenshots and questions about Chinese daily life. For a brief moment, Xiaohongshu — the platform refugees themselves nicknamed RedNote, a name the company would later adopt as its own official English branding — became a strange digital border crossing where American users and Chinese users looked at each other directly, sometimes with curiosity, sometimes with confusion, sometimes with unexpected warmth.

But for Chinese users, Xiaohongshu had never been merely a TikTok alternative.

It was closer to China’s Instagram, but that label was still incomplete. It was also a search engine for restaurants, a guidebook for travel, a beauty magazine, a shopping reference, a neighborhood whisper network and a platform where lifestyle became evidence. People did not only scroll Xiaohongshu for entertainment. They searched it before booking a hotel, buying a product, choosing a city, visiting a cafe or deciding whether a place was worth their time.

That is why its encounter with the World Cup feels so unusual.

The World Cup is fast, live, emotional and masculine-coded. Xiaohongshu is slow, searchable, aesthetic and lifestyle-coded. One is built around real-time collective emotion; the other around curated personal judgment. When China’s Instagram meets the world’s biggest football tournament, the question is not only whether Xiaohongshu can broadcast the games. The deeper question is whether it can survive the pressure of becoming something users never expected it to be.

Is this anxiety, or a new game?

The shelter, it turned out, had an expiration date. Platform data later showed that international newcomers retained at 50 to 56 percent on their second day on the app — respectable numbers for a stunt migration — but by the third and fourth day, the curve was already bending downward. The refugees did not so much leave as fade, the way a loud party gets quieter not because someone asks people to go home, but because the people who came for one specific reason eventually run out of reasons to stay.

That fade matters now, because Xiaohongshu is about to run the same experiment again — this time on purpose, and on a much larger budget.

02 / THE RIGHTS

Douyin walked away. Xiaohongshu paid for the experiment.

On May 27, 2026, Xiaohongshu signed with China Central Television to become an official rights holder for the 2026 World Cup in the United States, Mexico and Canada, joining CCTV’s own platforms and the state telecom-linked Migu as one of the only places in China legally allowed to stream the tournament live, on demand, and in short-video form. All 104 matches, free, across app, web and screen-casting. Industry reporting puts the price somewhere between RMB 1 billion and 1.7 billion — a figure that matters mostly because of who refused to pay it. Douyin, which held the previous tournament’s streaming rights in 2022, walked away from this one.

That absence is the real story. Douyin did not lose this bid; by most accounts it declined to fight for it. At nearly a billion daily active users, the marginal value of a single sporting event to Douyin is now small — advertising and live-commerce revenue already arrive on schedule, World Cup or not. For Xiaohongshu, the calculus runs the opposite way. The company has reportedly set two internal targets for this year: push daily active users toward 200 million, and shift its user base toward men. In practice, those are the same target wearing two names.

This was not a sudden idea. Xiaohongshu signed Simeone, Mourinho and Zidane around the 2022 Qatar World Cup with no broadcasting rights of its own, just to attach itself to the conversation from the outside. It made Mbappé a brand ambassador during Euro 2024. In August 2025, it added German football to its catalogue, including a Bundesliga streaming partnership. The World Cup deal is the most expensive chapter of a strategy that has been running for four years, not a one-off bet.

03 / THE FIT

The infrastructure and the demographic both resist the plan.

Still, money and intent are not the same as fit, and the fit here is awkward in two specific ways.

The first is infrastructural. Xiaohongshu has never run live video at this scale. The closest reference point belongs to its rival: during the 2022 final, Douyin’s live broadcast room drew 230 million viewers, peaking at 37 million concurrent — a number Xiaohongshu’s infrastructure has never been tested against. The app’s entire architecture, the two-column grid of static images, the search-driven discovery model, was built for a different kind of attention: slow, returning, comparison-based. A goal happens in two seconds and is gone. A skincare routine can be searched again next Tuesday.

The second is demographic, and it is the more stubborn of the two. Xiaohongshu’s user base was 71.98 percent female and 28.02 percent male as of the most recent platform data — a ratio of roughly seven to three that has barely moved in years. In 2018, men made up about 20 percent of the app. Seven years, a user base that grew more than tenfold, and the split moved less than ten percentage points — despite a 2021 ad campaign aimed squarely at male-heavy forums like Hupu and Tieba, and a 2022 incentive program promising billions of impressions to male-coded content categories: tech, cars, sports, streetwear. None of it meaningfully cracked the structure. What a single World Cup is supposed to achieve in 39 days, four years of deliberate, funded effort has not achieved.

04 / POSITIONING

A fixed address in the user’s head does not move on tournament time.

There’s a name for why this kind of ratio is so hard to move, and it isn’t really about football. Marketing theory calls it positioning — the idea, formalized by Al Ries and Jack Trout in the 1980s, that a brand doesn’t really compete for shelf space so much as for a fixed address inside a category in someone’s head. Once a platform becomes the answer to “where do I check before I buy something” or “where do people like me hang out,” that address calcifies into something closer to instinct than habit. You don’t decide to think of Xiaohongshu as a lifestyle app each time you open it. You just open it, the way you’d reach for a specific drawer without looking. Rewriting that instinct usually takes years of repeated experience, not 39 days of live football.

And the instinct cuts both ways. The same community norms that make Xiaohongshu feel safe and curated for its core users — the “sisters,” the gentle comment sections, the absence of the more combative tone common on male-heavy forums — are also a kind of immune system. Commentators inside China have already flagged the risk plainly: when “straight-man talk” collides with the platform’s existing etiquette, the likely result is core user flight and a diluted community atmosphere, not smooth assimilation. Xiaohongshu needs its new male visitors to stay polite enough not to scare off the women who built the place, while being football-rowdy enough to actually behave like football fans. Those two asks sit in some tension with each other.

05 / THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

The recommendation system keeps teaching the room what the room already is.

There’s a broader pattern worth naming here, even if it resists a clean causal claim. Communication theory offers two useful lenses. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence describes how people holding a minority opinion tend to self-censor when they sense the room disagrees, which makes the majority view look even more unanimous than it actually is — a dynamic that compounds quickly on a platform that is seven-tenths one gender. Eli Pariser’s filter bubble describes the second-order effect: a recommendation algorithm trained on what a mostly-female, lifestyle-oriented user base already engages with keeps feeding that same user base more of the same, narrowing the range of opinion it ever has to encounter. Put together, the two suggest that platforms with heavily skewed gender ratios don’t just reflect existing opinion gaps — they actively widen them, because dissenting voices quiet down and the algorithm rarely surfaces them in the first place.

Douyin’s user base, by contrast, is close to an even split — roughly 52 percent male to 48 percent female. Whether that balance produces more correction or simply louder collision is a genuinely open question; an engagement-driven algorithm doesn’t necessarily reward the most accurate opinion, just the most clickable one, and Cass Sunstein’s research on group polarization suggests that even mixed audiences can drift toward more extreme positions once people sort themselves into camps within the same feed. But it’s reasonable to expect that Xiaohongshu’s existing social contract, built by and for one demographic, will be the single biggest variable in whether the World Cup’s new male users find anything worth staying for once the tournament ends.