Kuaishou's content operations are shifting from broad vertical categories to niche communities.

"We hope that every type of interest can find its own audience, its own circle, and its own business on Kuaishou."

On August 29, Cheng Yixiao, founder, chairman and CEO of Kuaishou, said at the 2026 Kuaishou Photosynthesis Creator Conference that Kuaishou's biggest creative dividend in the future will come from its in-depth cultivation of a diverse and distinctive ecosystem.

Previously, Kuaishou's content operations were mostly based on broad vertical categories. For example, in the sports field, it introduced professional events and rural basketball content; in the agriculture field, it connected agricultural technology, e-commerce, and rural stages; and in the general knowledge field, it organized creators to provide content around key events such as the college entrance examination.

Breaking down into smaller circles essentially means continuing to identify differences in user needs beyond existing vertical categories.

Professional basketball fans, local event participants, and fitness enthusiasts all belong to the sports world, but they follow different authors and have different ways of interacting and consuming.

To date, Kuaishou claims that its platform has formed 632 interest circles and 4,112 subdivided interest tags, with each user having an average of 16 long-term interests.

Pigeon racing is a microcosm of this change. In the past, this type of content was usually categorized broadly as pets or leisure, but now Kuaishou identifies and operates it as an independent interest group. Kuaishou disclosed that the live streaming duration of creators with more than 100,000 followers in the pigeon racing field increased by 41% year-on-year.

For platforms, breaking down interests into smaller segments is not just about adding more content tags, but more importantly, about increasing the density of connections between users and creating stable interaction and business loops within smaller circles.

Cheng Yixiao revealed that 83% of users who follow each other based on shared interests will subsequently engage in frequent interactions. Since 2026, Kuaishou has added over 17 billion new follow relationships, with users averaging over 1,300 interactions per year in their private domain, and the monetization efficiency of their private domain reaching 2 to 3 times that of their public domain.

The first challenge of niche marketing is how to enable content and users, which are originally scattered across the long tail, to find each other more accurately.

Kuaishou is adjusting its distribution methods from both the content understanding and recommendation mechanisms.

On the one hand, the platform expands interest tags to the millions based on multimodal models and content understanding tools, claiming that the tag coverage reaches 99% and the accuracy exceeds 95%.

The system no longer simply determines whether a piece of content belongs to "sports" or "pets," but also continues to identify more specific themes, levels of expertise, and potential audiences.

Kuaishou stated that this adjustment increased the cold start speed of new content by 30% and increased the exposure of niche interests in the mid-to-long tail by 5%.

On the other hand, the criteria for recommendation systems are also changing.

In the past, real-time metrics such as likes, follows, and completion rates were the main references; now, Kuaishou has begun to determine which behaviors are more representative of genuine interests for different users and content, and further understands the semantic relationships and interest connections between content through the generative recommendation system OneRec.

More important than the technology itself is the changing distribution goals: platforms no longer just want content to be "swiped" around, but also want users to actively search for it, watch it continuously, and eventually follow the author.

Therefore, long-term behaviors such as following and watching, active searching, and live streaming interaction are given higher weight. After the relevant mechanism adjustment, authors with good long-term stickiness and search efficiency saw an average increase of 100% to 200% in traffic per article over 7 days; authors who also excel in short videos and live streaming saw 60% more traffic than the average author on the platform.

In addition to distribution, Kuaishou also plans to invest more resources in the long-term development of creators within specific communities.

The "Kuaishou Flavor Project," launching in September, will initially select 20,000 creators with a strong sense of community. Kuaishou states that the selection rate is less than 1%, and the platform will provide dedicated "one-stop operation" services, covering content optimization, persona enhancement, and short video, live streaming, and commercialization management.

Kuaishou has also launched the "Kuaishou Excellent Creation Program" for professional content creators, with a planned investment of "500 million RMB in cash + 50 billion RMB in traffic" and the provision of resources such as events, commercial deals and IP collaborations. The first batch of 1,000 invitations has already been sent out.

Tools on the industry side are also being improved. In September, Kuaishou plans to launch a content open platform, modularizing the content distribution, live interaction, transaction conversion, and AI production tools already applied to cultural, sports, and entertainment projects, and opening them up to industry partners in film, sports, and performance, hoping to further shorten the link from content reach to transaction conversion.

If this mechanism can be established, niche interests will no longer be just the long tail of the content ecosystem, but may become a group of business units that are more numerous and smaller in scale in the next stage of Kuaishou, but can continue to accumulate.

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