The Informal Labor of Content Creators: Situating Xiaohongshu's Key Opinion Consumers in Relationships to Marketers, Consumer Brands, and the Platform

TL;DR

This study examines the informal labor of Key Opinion Consumers (KOCs) on Xiaohongshu (RED) in China through nine months of online ethnography, revealing that KOC labor is co-produced by creators, marketers, brands, and the platform. It introduces the concept of informal labor to capture how KOC content creation is essential yet undervalued and invisibilized within corporate systems and platform governance. The findings show how platform-curated personas, niche vertical content, and relational labor enable monetization while labor remains precarious, with limited formal recognition or protection. The paper discusses implications for labor rights, platform governance, and policy, arguing for greater transparency, fair compensation, and protections for informal platform labor in the growing Internet economy.

Abstract

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 propose the concept of ``informal labor'' to offer 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.