“Not all influencer stories are glamorous:” How RedNote (Xiaohongshu) turns everyday posts into unpaid marketing work

How does a social media platform quietly transform regular users into de-facto marketers? And who benefits?

New research by University of Michigan School of Information PhD candidates Huiran Yi and Lu Xian examines how China’s social media and e-commerce platform Xiaohongshu (called Rednote or RED) turns regular users into everyday promoters. Their posts can boost sales, but these users — called Key Opinion Consumers) — are frequently uncompensated and under-recognized. 

“When we think of influencers, we picture super-successful people with millions of followers,” Yi says. “But there’s a stage when creators have hundreds or thousands of followers and are still trying to gain visibility, secure brand deals and earn income. From my work experience and our data collection, many such creators are in precarious positions. They’re struggling for visibility and payment, yet motivated by success stories and trying to replicate tactics they see. We wanted to surface those realities and show that not all influencer stories are glamorous.” 

Yi and Xian conducted a nine-month study on RedNote, analyzing posts, reactions and engagement patterns. They then interviewed multiple stakeholders to understand how everyday lifestyle sharing becomes a pipeline for commerce, and how small creators’ work can be leveraged without being compensated. 

Published in the 28th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW, April 2025), their paper, “The Informal Labor in Creator Economy: The Making of Key Opinion Consumers From Ordinary Users on Xiaohongshu,” traces how RedNote’s everyday-life aesthetic pushes small creators to produce marketable content that is not being being counted as ads, leaving their labor invisible on paper and often unpaid. 

RedNote, which integrates e-commerce into everyday-life sharing, is different from TikTok or Instagram, which clearly label promotional videos or direct commerce links. 

“RedNote tends to present product promotion more subtly through lifestyle posts,” Yi says. “It’s less intrusive on the surface, but it still steers users toward products. That can mean no compensation and no formal recognition. The labor becomes invisible on paper.” 

Huiran Yi, a fifth-year PhD student at UMSI, came to UMSI after earning a master’s in media, culture and communication at New York University. Yi spent nearly three years on the marketing team at a multinational cosmetic company in Shanghai, collaborating closely with digital influencers. That front-row view of how influencer campaigns are brokered across marketers, advertisers and platforms sparked Yi’s academic focus on the social and cultural aspects of technology and platform governance in China, as well as labor within data-driven sociotechnical systems. Yi’s PhD advisor is UMSI professor Silvia Lindtner. 

Lu Xian, a sixth-year PhD student at UMSI, studies data governance for secure, reliable and contestable AI, and is also interested in the hidden labor that sustains these systems. Previously, she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and mathematics at Macalester College, and a graduate degree in biostatistics. Her PhD advisor is UMSI associate professor Florian Schaub.

Read “The Informal Labor in Creator Economy: The Making of Key Opinion Consumers From Ordinary Users on Xiaohongshu,” in the May issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. See the abstract below: 

This paper critically examines flexible content creation conducted by Key Opinion Consumers (KOCs) on a prominent social media and e-commerce platform in China, Xiaohongshu (RED). Drawing on nine-month ethnographic work conducted online, we find that the production of the KOC role on RED is predicated on the interactions and negotiations among multiple stakeholders---content creators, marketers, consumer brands (corporations), and the platform. KOCs are instrumental in RED influencer marketing tactics and amplify the mundane and daily life content popular on the platform. They navigate the dynamics in the triangulated relations with other stakeholders in order to secure economic opportunities for producing advertorial content, and yet, the labor involved in producing such content is deliberately obscured to make it appear as spontaneous, ordinary user posts for the sake of marketing campaigns. Meanwhile, the commercial value of their work is often underestimated and overshadowed in corporate paperwork, platform technological mechanisms, and business models, resulting in and reinforcing inadequate recognition and compensation of KOCs. We illustrate the precarious nature of a form of creativity-driven digital employment through the case of KOCs on the RED platform by demonstrating how this work is made informal. This perspective offers a new lens to understand content creation labor that is indispensable yet unrecognized by the social media industry. We advocate for a contextualized and nuanced examination of how labor is valued and compensated and urge for better protections and working conditions for informal laborers like KOCs

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Learn more about PhD candidates Huiran Yi and Lu Xian by visiting their UMSI profiles. 

Check out more information about UMSI’s PhD in Information program!