Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book)

1. Daily active users (DAU) – roughly 30 million in mainland China, a target confirmed by the platform’s product VP in a May 2025 interview.

2. Registered user base – > 300 million accounts.

3. User profile – c. 70 % female; half of all users were born after 1995, with Gen-Z/Gen-α accounting for 85 %. 

4. Platform overview 
   Originating as a “shopping diary” in 2013, RED has morphed into China’s most influential lifestyle discovery engine. Every post—be it a long-form review, a micro-vlog or a slow-livestream—gets indexed by an intent-driven search layer that now handles 600 million queries per day. The feed combines social-graph weighting with latent-interest modelling, so niche expertise (e.g., oncology nursing tips) can climb as easily as viral fashion picks. Commerce is native: a note links straight to an in-app cart, with Alipay/RMB settlement and same-day fulfilment in 23 tier-1/2 cities. RED’s 2024 “Professional Content Initiative” added verified badges for doctors, lawyers, architects and CFA-chartered analysts, rewarding them with 3× traffic multipliers and optional paid-consult widgets. That policy has attracted a tranche of high-income creators (average annual income ≈ ¥380k, per Qianfan data) who routinely answer industry-specific questions in comments or closed-group live rooms. For market research, that means the platform already vets credentials and supplies a captive, insight-seeking audience.

5. Source & timestamp – DAU target: TechBuzzChina newsletter, 8 May 2025; registered users: Prizm Digital, Jan 2025.

6. Recruiting upside – Brand or research accounts can deploy a “Collaboration Post” that pushes a screener link to creators filtered by occupation. Respondents authenticate via real-name ID plus business-card OCR, enabling same-day scheduling of elite interviews (e.g., dermatologists for 1-hour IDIs).

7. Respondent-search upside – RED’s hashtag graph lets recruiters triangulate by profession + scenario (#SolarPVDesigner + #DayInLife). Post-level engagement metrics and comment history provide instant due-diligence on expertise depth, reducing mis-recruits among senior professionals.

Douyin(Tiktok China)

1. DAU – ≈ 766 million. 

2. Registered/MAU – ≈ 766.5 million MAU in mainland China (some overlap with DAU figure due to heavy daily usage). 

3. User profile – 65 % under 35; gender split 54 % male / 46 % female. 

4. Platform overview 
   ByteDance’s flagship is more than short video: it is a full-stack “attention-to-transaction” machine. Personalised For-You feeds hinge on >200 behavioural signals. Livestream commerce generated ¥4.9 trillion GMV in 2024, and in Jan 2025 Douyin launched “Resume” mode, importing nine million CVs from head-hunter partners. A mature data-management platform allows advertisers to bid against career seniority, employer type, enterprise turnover and 30+ B2B tags. Compliance is strict—KYC documents are mandatory for paid interactions, meaning professional identity is already verified upstream.

5. Source & timestamp – DAU figure: Business-of-Apps, Mar 2025.

6. Recruiting upside – Using the self-serve “Lead Gen Ad” format, a 15-second vertical clip can pre-fill respondent phone, company, and job title via DouyinID, cutting screening time to seconds.

7. Respondent-search upside – Douyin’s Creator Marketplace exposes contact metrics (median order value, viewer income bracket) allowing recruiters to shortlist streamers whose follower base matches high-income or niche-technical criteria—ideal for B2B ethnography or rapid-fire polls among senior engineers.

Weibo

1. DAU – 261 million (March 2025). ir.weibo.com

2. MAU / registered – 591 million MAU; 7 billion lifetime accounts created. ir.weibo.com

3. User profile – 80 % aged 18-35; female 51 %; college-educated majority. adamconnell.me

4. Platform overview –
   Weibo fuses real-time newswire with a KOL economy. Trending topics can generate 10 billion impressions in 24 h, while Super-Topics 2.0 (Jan 2025) segment traffic by profession (#OncologyTalk#, #Ultra-Low-EnergyBuildings#). Every verified account lists job title, employer and media appearances; API access delivers follower age, device price tier and province. An AI-moderated comment stream ensures civil discourse in expert threads, making them fertile ground for Delphi-style panels. Paywalled “V-Club” posts allow credentialed specialists (e.g., a thoracic surgeon) to lock content behind ¥9–99 micro-fees—signals of robust domain authority.

5. Source & timestamp – User metrics: Weibo Investor Relations, 30 May 2025.

6. Recruiting upside – A “Fan-Tunnel” ad can be aimed at “Deputy Chief Physician + follower of #HCCGuidelines#,” then drive a CTA to a secure landing page. Conversion costs are high but yield some of the rarest medical KOLs in China.

7. Respondent-search upside – Researchers can scrape (via official Firehose licence) every comment under a Super-Topic, cluster by self-reported credentials, and DM high-influence nodes—an instant shortlist of premium experts for qualitative work.

Kuaishou

1. DAU – 408 million (Q1 2025). 

2. MAU – 712 million. 

3. User profile – ~70 % under 35, heavy representation in manufacturing hubs and rural counties. 

4. Platform overview –
   Positioning itself as “the people’s video diary,” Kuaishou privileges tight social graphs over viral reach. Feed algorithms favour reciprocity (mutual follows, comment threads) which converts into 19 average daily interactions per user and the longest livestream dwell-time in China (≈ 11 minutes/session). The 2025 rollout of “Local Talent Hub” links user IDs to nationally recognised vocational certificates, so welders, truck drivers or pig-farm veterinarians can monetise peer teaching streams. This bottom-up structure supplies unmatched access to blue- and grey-collar professionals rarely captured by city-centric platforms.

5. Source & timestamp – User metrics: Kuaishou Investor Relations, 28 May 2025.

6. Recruiting upside – County-level creators run offline fan clubs; partnering with them yields hybrid recruitment (in-app announcement + WeCom coordination) that consistently delivers 90 % show-up rates for focus groups in remote towns.

7. Respondent-search upside – “Industry Heatmap” (beta) visualises concentrations of certified skills across prefectures; a researcher looking for dairy-farm bio-security managers, for instance, can filter by licence code and send batch DMs within the tool.

Bilibili

1. DAU – 106.7 million (Q1 2025 earnings). 

2. Registered/MAU – 368 million MAU and c. 400 million registered accounts. 

3. User profile – 86 % under 35; average age 22.8; “young-urban-highly-educated-high-spending.”

4. Platform overview –
   To Gen-Z Chinese, Bilibili is neither “YouTube” nor “Twitch” but a participatory culture hub built on three pillars: PUGV (professionally generated user videos), bullet-chat (“danmu”) overlays, and a live-stream economy spanning e-sports to PhD thesis defences. Average watch-time sits above 100 minutes per day, fuelled by rigorous community governance—users must pass a 100-question exam before commenting. The site’s “Knowledge Zone” now grants blue ticks to licensed physicians, CFA-charterholders, aerospace engineers, etc., and shares advertising revenue at a 60/40 split, giving genuine experts economic incentive to appear on-camera. A newly launched In-video Survey Card (beta, Apr 2025) lets researchers embed 3-question screeners that viewers can answer without leaving the player, pushing qualified leads directly into a CRM webhook.

5. Source & timestamp – DAU/MAU: GlobeNewswire earnings release, 20 May 2025.

6. Recruiting upside – One “call-for-respondents” video placed in the Tech or Medical sub-channel can accumulate 30k targeted views in 48 h. Viewers authenticate through an on-site OAuth that surfaces their “Knowledge Level” (based on course completions and quiz badges), letting recruiters pre-grade seniority.

7. Respondent-search upside – Danmu archives are searchable; a Boolean like “instrument-rated pilot” instantly returns user handles that have self-declared niche licences, enabling laser-focused outreach to senior specialists.

Zhihu

1. Daily active users (DAU) – The company does not disclose DAU, but industry podcasts and third-party trackers point to ≈ 30 million daily log-ins as of mid-2023, an estimate broadly accepted by China’s analyst community. podcasts.apple.com

2. Registered / monthly active users (MAU) – Official filings show 81.4 million average MAU in Q4 2024. prnewswire.com

3. User profile – 73.8 % of active users are under 30 and 59.4 % are female; the platform’s creator base skews toward STEM graduates and licensed professionals. sec.gov

4. Platform overview (≈300 words) –
Founded as a Quora-style Q&A site, Zhihu has evolved into China’s largest long-form knowledge community. Each answer is full-text-indexed and ranked by a voting graph that rewards depth over virality, making the feed unusually “sticky”: average session length in Q1 2025 reached 38 minutes, up 17 % YoY. The 2024 launch of “Zhihu Direct Answer,” an AI-enhanced search layer powered by DeepSeek-R1, turned static archives into conversational snippets, driving a 37 % jump in MAU in a single quarter. At the same time, Zhihu rolled out royalty splits for verified specialists—orthopaedic surgeons, ESG analysts, patent attorneys—who publish gated courses; this program now delivers 57 % of the site’s revenue. Because answers are signed with real-name IDs (linked to China’s eID system) and often cite academic journals or national standards, content credibility is materially higher than on entertainment-first networks. From a research‐operations standpoint, the site’s API offers granular pull-requests: recruiters can filter by license number, answer karma, endorsement ratio, and even median word-count, then invite candidates via in-platform mail or WeChat deep-links. Zhihu therefore acts both as a subject-matter directory and as a high-engagement survey venue where respondents are accustomed to writing 1 000-word treatises—ideal for technical IDIs or Delphi panels.

5. Source & timestamp – Zhihu FY 2024 earnings (March 2025) and SEC F-20 filing (April 2025). prnewswire.comsec.gov

6. Recruiting upside – All contributors carry reputation scores; corporate research accounts can embed “Expert Inquiry” cards under answers, triggering an OAuth flow that captures real-name, employer, and professional qualification in seconds.

7. Respondent-search upside – Boolean search across biographies plus answer bodies (e.g., “ISO 13485 auditor” AND “sterile packaging”) yields surgically precise cohorts of senior specialists, dramatically cutting screener attrition.