Douyin Xingtu and China's influencer marketplaces: booking KOLs without an agency middleman
Short version: yes, you can book Chinese influencers yourself, directly, without an agency taking a cut of the fee. Every major platform now runs an official marketplace for exactly that — Xingtu on Douyin, Pugongying on Xiaohongshu, Huahuo on Bilibili, Juxing on Kuaishou. What these tools remove is the booking middleman: the person who forwards a rate card and adds a markup. What they don't remove is the judgment middleman — the one who knows which creator is worth the rate, what the post should actually say, and how to read the data afterward. Confuse the two and you'll save 15% on fees while wasting the whole budget.
I get this question a lot from brands who've just discovered these platforms exist: "If Douyin has an official portal to hire creators, why am I paying an agency?" It's a fair question, and the honest answer annoys both sides. The agencies who tell you the platforms are too complex to use yourself are protecting a margin. The brands who think the platform replaces everything an agency does are about to learn an expensive lesson in Mandarin. Here's how the marketplaces actually work, and where the line really sits.
What these marketplaces are
Each big platform built its own official system to match brands with creators, handle briefs, process payment, and — crucially — enforce ad disclosure. They exist partly because Chinese regulators require paid content to be labeled, and routing commercial deals through the official platform is how the platform proves compliance. On Douyin and Bilibili in particular, paid commercial content is supposed to go through the official marketplace; going around it (a "private single," or 私单) risks the creator's account and leaves you with no recourse if the post underperforms or disappears.
| Platform | Marketplace | Best for | Notable feature |
|---|---|---|---|
| Douyin | Xingtu (巨量星图) | Reach, short video, livestream selling | Deep CPM/CPE data, audience and conversion filters; the largest creator pool |
| Xiaohongshu (Red) | Pugongying / "Dandelion" (蒲公英) | Consideration, beauty, lifestyle, product seeding | Three models: product seeding, commission, and custom content orders |
| Bilibili | Huahuo / "Sparkle" (花火) | Long-form, deep-interest niches, younger audiences | Smart pricing suggestions; all paid content must route through it |
| Kuaishou | Juxing (磁力聚星) | Lower-tier cities, livestream commerce, regional reach | Specified vs. recruited creator models across video and livestream |
The genuinely useful part is the data. On Xingtu you can pull a creator's price tiers, follower distribution, engagement rates, and a "cost-performance" read before you commit a cent. That's information an agency used to gatekeep. Now it's a login away — if you have a login.
The catch nobody mentions: you need a Chinese business account
Here's the wall most foreign brands hit on day one. These are not consumer apps you sign up for with an email. To open a brand account on Xingtu or Pugongying you generally need a verified Chinese business entity — a business license, and often a Chinese-registered company or an authorized cross-border store setup. No entity, no dashboard. This is the single biggest reason "just book them yourself" is easier said than done for an overseas brand that hasn't yet set up in-market.
There are legitimate routes around it — a cross-border store structure, a WFOE, or authorizing a trusted local partner to hold the account — but each is a decision with tax and compliance consequences, not a checkbox. If you don't have a China entity yet, the marketplace question is premature; you have an entry-structure question first.
What the platform removes — and what it doesn't
Split the old agency bundle into two things. The marketplace kills the first and leaves the second entirely on your plate:
- Removed — the booking layer. Rate discovery, contracting, payment escrow, and basic campaign admin are now self-service. If your agency's only value was forwarding a WeChat quote and adding 20%, the platform genuinely replaces them.
- Not removed — creator selection. A dashboard tells you a creator's numbers. It does not tell you their comment section is full of "已取关" (just unfollowed), that their fanbase is the wrong tier of city for you, or that they've done three competing brands this quarter. Reading a creator is judgment, not filtering.
- Not removed — the brief and the content. The single biggest driver of a post's performance is what it says, and a Chinese-native creative brief is not something you machine-translate from your global deck. The platform won't write it for you.
- Not removed — negotiation and Mandarin ops. List price is a starting point. Bundling, timing around 618 or Double 11, usage rights, reshoot terms — that's a conversation, in Chinese, with a creator or their MCN who negotiates these daily and knows you don't.
- Not removed — post-campaign reading. The data comes back rich and in Chinese. Knowing whether a 3% engagement rate is good for that creator in that category is the whole game.
MCNs are still in the room
A quieter reality: the marketplaces didn't disintermediate the MCNs (the agencies that manage creators), they institutionalized them. A huge share of the creators worth booking are signed to an MCN, and you're negotiating with that MCN through the platform whether you notice or not. The platform standardized the plumbing; it didn't remove the party on the other end of the deal. So "no middleman" is only half true — you've removed your agency, not the creator's.
So should you run it in-house?
My honest rule of thumb, having watched brands try both:
- Run it yourself if you already have a China entity, a Mandarin-native marketer on the team who lives on these platforms, and you're doing enough volume that a per-campaign agency fee stops making sense. At that scale the marketplaces are a real cost saver and you keep the data in-house.
- Get help if you're pre-entry, if nobody on your team can read a creator's comment section natively, or if you're doing a handful of campaigns a year where one bad KOL pick costs more than a year of fees. Just make sure you're paying for judgment, not for a login you could have had yourself.
The useful shift is that the question has changed. It used to be "which agency?" Now it's "what part of this do I actually need help with?" — and for a lot of brands the answer is selection and brief, not booking. That's a cheaper, sharper engagement than the old full-service retainer, and you should scope it that way. If you want a second read on which creators are worth the rate before you commit budget, that's part of the KOL roster work I do.
Bottom line
China's influencer marketplaces — Xingtu, Pugongying, Huahuo, Juxing — are real, official, and worth using; they hand you the price data and payment plumbing that agencies used to guard. But they remove the booking middleman, not the judgment one. You still need a China entity to log in, a native brief to make the post land, and someone who can tell a good creator from a good-looking dashboard. Book direct when you have those; buy judgment, not markup, when you don't.
Weighing whether to build this in-house or get help for your China launch? That's the work I do — reach out. And if you're still deciding when to use big names versus everyday advocates, read KOL vs KOC marketing in China.