Xiaohongshu's World Cup bet only works if men stay after the final

Almost every content platform can rent a crowd for a big event. The real question is what happens the morning after, and that is the test Xiaohongshu now faces. As TechNode reports, the app carried all 104 matches of the 2026 World Cup across 39 days, its first run at premium sports rights, and by its own numbers the audience showed up: user time doubled month over month in July and some matches held viewers for more than 52 minutes on average.

The audience it got is not the audience it had

Xiaohongshu built its business on women browsing skincare, fashion, and product recommendations in a vertical, short-form feed. The World Cup handed it something close to the opposite. Men made up around 60% of livestream viewers during the group stage and roughly 80% by the knockout rounds, according to figures the company released. That is a demographic swing most platforms never get to engineer, and it arrived tied to horizontal, long-duration video that has little in common with the scrolling the app was designed around.

This is the part worth sitting with. Xiaohongshu did not just prove it can stream football. It proved it can host a different kind of user watching a different kind of content, at the same time as its usual crowd. Managing two audiences with opposite habits inside one feed is a real operational problem, and it shapes what the recommendation engine surfaces, which creators get rewarded, and what advertisers think they are buying.

Borrowed traffic versus earned habit

The company clearly knows the risk. It followed the tournament by adding 12 domestic competitions, including grassroots leagues like the Guizhou Village Super League, precisely because a one-off global event does not build a habit on its own. The company also points to users who came for football and drifted into communities for motorcycles, outdoor gear, and electronics. That drift is the outcome Xiaohongshu actually needs, and it is far from guaranteed.

Here is the catch the numbers hide. Search interest tripling and posts running 27 times ahead of the 2022 opening day are event metrics. They measure the pull of the World Cup, not the pull of Xiaohongshu. The 1,390 football communities and thousands of instant post-match comments are impressive, but community energy that peaks on a whistle can fade just as fast. None of the released figures tell us how many of those men opened the app a month after Spain lifted the trophy.

Why the retention question is the whole story

Long-form video and livestreaming are expensive to run and expensive to license. For that investment to pay off, Xiaohongshu needs the football audience to become a standing feature of the platform, not a seasonal visitor. The lifestyle-plus-analysis mix it leaned on, watch-party setups, late-night skincare, memes alongside tactical breakdowns from figures like Fan Zhiyi, is a smart way to make football feel native to the app. Whether that mix is sticky enough to hold a mostly male audience through ordinary domestic matches is the thing no one can answer yet. The World Cup was the easy part. The next six months are the experiment that counts.