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The ‘Chinese Instagram’ Xiaohongshu was at the top of the table of applications most downloaded by Apple users in the United States due to the imminent closure of TikTok, which will be turned off in that country on January 19 if the Supreme Court finally fails against him.
On the platform, the arrival of foreign users has been greeted with the label ‘TikTok refugees’. The local news portal Sina echoes messages from some American users who claim to be outraged by the imminent closure of TikTok and point out that they chose Xiaohongshu precisely because they had heard that it was similar to that short video network.
After Xiaohongshu reached the top of Apple’s chart, influencer Jen Hamilton, with almost 4 million followers, uploaded a video to TikTok introducing herself in Chinese and another in which she states, laughing: “It’s impossible to underestimate how I don’t care if the Chinese have my data. (…) I don’t care.”
It should be noted that the current number 2 on the iPhone download chart is Lemon8, Xiaohongshu’s competitor developed precisely by TikTok’s parent company, the Chinese technology company ByteDance.
Xiaohongshu (‘little red book’ in Mandarin, known as RedNote in English) debuted in 2013 as a shopping review app, and evolved into a mix of Instagram and Pinterest, focusing on features such as photo slides, user recommendations or electronic commerce.
After gaining traction among young Chinese during the ‘zero covid’ years, the social network currently has 300 million active users each month, of which 79% are women.
However, technology news portal TechCrunch states that the platform is focused on Chinese users and has no plans to establish operations in the US despite its sudden explosion of popularity in that country.
Xiaohongshu’s success has attracted investors such as Chinese digital giants Tencent and Alibaba, putting the company’s valuation at around $17 billion.
According to information appearing in the business press, the platform would have generated profits of more than $1 billion in 2024.
EFE
