Nor is the flow of Prozac.
Wen 丨 Fan Dongcheng
"If you have a question, you'll have an answer."
This is the new slogan that the Q&A community knows about at this time last year before going public by "There is a problem, on the know". Whether such needs of users have been fully met is not to say for the time being, the listing of the New York Stock Exchange has gone for 291 days, and now it has been online for 11 years, and Zhihu is still struggling to find its own answer on the road of future development.
At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, Zhihu has jumped to the small high point of industry attention several times in recent days.
Following the disclosure by authoritative channels on December 20, 2021 that Zhihu was interviewed and punished by the Cyberspace Administration of Beijing for repeatedly appearing in issues such as information prohibited by laws and regulations from being published or transmitted, since December 25, 2021, a number of media have followed up and reported the news that Zhihu may return to Hong Kong for listing.
Under the new situation of suddenly increasing uncertainty and the heavy setbacks of Chinese stocks and the misery and fog lingering, the three consecutive quarters of reporting losses know how to deal with the old problems such as the alienation of the internal community atmosphere and the embarrassment of the business model, which is more urgent and more eye-catching than in the past.
Although community content is further referred to as generalization, hydration, storytelling, and sense of gain with the continuous expansion of the user circle, it is now on this basis that new rules are set and higher requirements are put forward for the adhesion of its content ecology to existing users and potential users, and the videoization of content has been placed in a very important position, and the intention of the benchmark video community B station is already clear at a glance.
The impetus for transformation comes from within. In terms of market capitalization alone, as of the publication of this article, the market value of Station B is 15.848 billion US dollars, and the market value of Zhihu is 2.774 billion US dollars, and the volume of the former is 5.71 times that of the latter.
To this end, Zhihu launched the first Gaozan Joint Creation Competition on December 15, 2021. The so-called joint creation, that is, graphic creators and video creators cooperate to jointly output content. According to official data, as of the end of the event on January 5, 2022, more than 4,000 respondents participated, more than 2,000 video submissions, and a total of more than 200 million views, covering dozens of fields and topics such as science, history, workplace, psychology, and brain holes.
Co-creation is a new feature that went live on October 29, 2021. Zhihu obviously hopes to use this move to encourage the graphic creators who originally occupied the absolute dominant position in the community to license their original content to the video creators who have been entrusted with heavy responsibilities by Zhihu to video-based presentation, and then gradually increase the proportion of video-based content in the community. The feature is called "in the name of co-creators, so that good content can be 'watched' again."
Compared with inviting head video creators to settle in and produce high-quality high-quality hot content, converting mature graphic works in the community into videos is undoubtedly cheaper and faster, if you don't think about it, there is a reason, but in the end, such an old work renovation game is tantamount to turning the apples in the orchard into pears overnight. Of course, the idea is very beautiful, but the apple is the apple, the pear is the pear, just look like it is far from enough.
Medium and short videos as a new promotion tool has long been popular, with content video to drive user stickiness to increase behind the knowledge of greater traffic, which is highly related to its current revenue composition.
According to the financial report, in the third quarter of 2021, Zhihu's revenue was 823.5 million yuan, of which online advertising business revenue was 321.1 million yuan, accounting for 39%; commercial content solution business revenue was 278.4 million yuan, accounting for 33.8%; paid membership business revenue was 178.3 million yuan, accounting for 21.7%; other innovative business revenue including online education and e-commerce was 45.67 million yuan, accounting for 5.5%.
Friends who are familiar with the zhihu business will not be unaware that the top two online advertising and commercial content solutions above are actually traffic-based businesses, the latter is "zhi +" is actually deeply customized advertising, and these two categories together account for 72.8% of the total revenue.
The slowdown in traffic growth and the economic downturn and other complex factors make it difficult for the current domestic Internet platform with advertising as the main source of revenue to make great strides, and the monthly active byteDance of the whole line of products exceeds 1.9 billion, the monthly active 101.2 million, the realization ability is not as good as the former, and investors need to know how to solve quickly. Now, not only is zhihu's solution far from sexy, but the background of the knowledge community that was recognized in the early years of its soul has also been greatly diluted by mixed information, which may even be dangerous.
01
Old users abandoned
Since the commercialization process of Zhihu began in 2016, there have been old users on the Internet who have continuously expressed their mockery of the generalization of Zhihu content, and jokes such as "water" and "yellow" are also among them.
Criticism has intensified in 2018. However, the management does not seem to care about this, or they are very aware of what changes this breaking of the circle may bring, and the small issues are not the big picture. As Zhou Yuan, the founder of Zhihu, said at the 5th Salt Club Conference in May 2018, Zhihu is moving from a knowledge community that serves some people to an inclusive content platform.
Knowing that a group of elite users gathered in the early days, Kai-Fu Lee and Ma Huateng have all flashed, which shaped its original temperament as a small circle of knowledge. Unlike the expansion of the scale of users in Station B, which is more about starting from points of interest outside the second dimension, the expansion of Zhihu is aimed at different groups of people, and more accurately, it is aimed at the vast sinking market.
Also at the above-mentioned Salt Club conference, Zhou Yuan revealed that the number of registered users of Zhihu reached 160 million, an annual increase of 95.12%, the user structure has undergone significant changes, and a large number of users in second- and third-tier cities have joined Zhihu. The advertisements placed on CCTV during the 2018 World Cup were accused of being vulgar, but more than two months later, Zhihu's user disk expanded rapidly, adding more than 40 million new users, with a total scale of 200 million.
Zhou Yuan has a strong interest in sinking users, and knowing that it has clearly and actively embraced the sinking market in August 2019, when it completed a total of $434 million in F round financing led by Kuaishou and followed by Baidu.
Compared with the previous investment of various VC institutions from a financial point of view, Kuaishou and Baidu's money entered Zhihu, which reflects the strategic concept of mutual integration and vertical. Zhou Yuan took the initiative to throw out a small story: he and Su Hua went to a meeting together, during which he found that Su Hua was brushing Zhihu with a trumpet, and he was brushing a fast hand with a trumpet.
The arrival of sinking users soon changed the tone of Zhihu. Topics such as gender sentiments, politics, economy, and military affairs, and getting rich have been welcomed, and social hotspots and entertainment news have often been at the top of the hot list.
From the trajectory of the change of high-praise content, it is not difficult to find the change of the popular trend of the community.
In March 2013, the user "hx liang" created a favorite called "Agree with more than 1000 answers", which included earlier topics published in 2011-2013 such as "What is Tencent's core competitiveness" (like super 3700), "Does the product manager need technology", "Is the girl important or self-esteem important", etc.; in March 2014, the user "Jianghu Renren Called Former Brother" created a favorite called "Agree with the answer of super 3k". At that time, the hot topics included "why many young people are willing to go to Beijing, Shanghai and Suishen to work hard" and "what price does it take to be a maverick person"; in February 2019, the user "Ma Yue" created "30,000 votes have fallen behind, here are 100,000 votes favorites", including hot topics such as "What are the things that girls know after they have a boyfriend" (zanchao 190,000), "What is the school that you became famous for what you did during your time in school", and so on.
Emotional topics are already a big category. Searching for keywords such as "marriage", "divorce", "boyfriend", etc., you can see a large number of high-praise answers. For example, in searching for the keyword "marriage", under the question "Why don't you want to get married", there were up to 81,000 likes of the answer, and under the question "Do boys really think it's the same with whom?", 41,000 users praised the user's "SongBai" answer.
Of course, these high-praise Q&A questions and answers are not worth mentioning compared to the once-hot topic "What secrets have you found on your boyfriend/girlfriend's mobile phone". The latter has now received more than 52,000 users' attention, and one user's answer to his emotional experience has been praised by more than 400,000 people, which is rare to know.
Zhihu hot content covers the general confusion of young users about emotions, growth, wealth, society and other aspects. This has also become one of the current characteristics of Zhihu. It is not so much that Zhihu chose this group of people, but rather that these young people who are in the confused period of life have chosen Zhihu.
The changes in the community atmosphere have a variety of effects.
A group of old users are fleeing. There is no shortage of such discussions on social media such as Douban and Weibo. These old users believe that the value of Zhihu's knowledge is becoming thinner and thinner, and the emotional and chicken soup answers are highly sought after, which makes them lose the impulse to brush Zhihu.
Another group of old users, although they have not fled, their accounts have been almost dormant. They think that zhihu is a tool now, and they will only open zhihu when they need to understand some related issues such as medical treatment and law, and they will go straight to the search box. For this group of users, Zhihu is just a different form of Baidu.
02
The sense of separation intensifies
At the same time as the initial establishment of the advertising model, Zhihu also spent a lot of energy to try value-added paid products, including the development of the commercial value of the head big V.
In April 2016, Zhihu launched the native advertising system, while value-added products launched Value, Zhihu Live, Zhihu Bookstore, etc.
At the beginning of 2018, Zhihu integrated Zhihu Live and Zhihu Bookstore into a knowledge market, and in May of the same year, the knowledge market was upgraded to Zhihu University, adding products such as book clubs and private classes. Seven months later, in December 2018, Zhou Yuan sent a letter to all employees and adjusted the company's organizational structure. After the adjustment, Zhihu is divided into front, middle and back end, the front end is composed of the community content division, the membership business department, the commercial advertising business department, the middle end is composed of the community business platform and the technology middle office, and the back end is the strategic development department and the capability center including finance and legal affairs. I know that the business model has been basically completed so far.
In the past few years, zhihu has made many moves in the knowledge market, but the achievements of each product are not bright to be said to be single-handed, until now, no product can stand alone, but the membership system of a variety of knowledge paid products has gradually run through. In March 2019, Zhihu launched a full-site paid membership system.
But knowing what to continue to attract users to pay has always been a problem.
Based on the characteristics of the community, monetizing big V knowledge seems logical and easy to win, but the actual promotion is not as good as expected.
The difficulties on the supply side have been reported by various media.
In an interview with Interface News in February 2019, Lu Xiaojing said that he declined Zhihu's invitation to open a Live course, mainly because he believed that he did not have a complete knowledge system on specific topics, did not have the ability to organize experience into a course, and he believed that many big Vs were like him in this regard, and the emotional and paragraph sub-V were even more so.
The consumer side has mediocre feedback. Reading free articles is fine, once the fee is charged, the fee collector can not come up with the content of the system, the user will feel that the money is spent in vain, word of mouth can not be talked about, repurchase is even more unthinkable.
Zhihu user Xiaohan told Heiko Finance that he often paid to buy Zhihu Live in 2016 and 2017, in his opinion, personal growth Live speakers generally output more chicken soup, feeling that it is the distillation of their articles or supplement some examples; and computer professional skills courses are more helpful, because such courses are often systematic, experienced speakers will cite many examples, but the disadvantage is that it is difficult to sustain. "A teacher is proficient in several Live courses, from the prospects, technology, practical aspects of the industry to talk about, in fact, a few times is almost the same."
Live products mainly focus on high-end knowledge with professional output capabilities, but the final output results are difficult to scale and sustain, which has become an important reason why the knowledge market is difficult to develop and grow.
Zhihu member content mainly includes salt selection columns, e-books, magazines, Live lectures, etc., of which columns and e-books are now more popular products.
Luo Xiang, a law big V who became popular on the B station and has 1.89 million fans on Zhihu, made his lecture notes into a column. Today, Luo Xiang has put 3 columns and 2 e-books on the shelves of Zhihu. In addition to legal content, the relatively popular columns on zhihu include psychology, history, and medicine. However, judging from the number of user reviews, these columns are not as popular as stories or online articles.
In the Zhihu member interface, "watching stories" is ranked before "increasing knowledge". In popular stories, a large amount of content is rated by one or two thousand buyers. A modern romance novel published in August 2021 called "Ambiguous And Lost" has been rated by more than 7,000 members. In the knowledge column, two- or three-digit buyer reviews are the norm, and one or two thousand buyer reviews are already quite popular content. Luo Xiang's "Circle Justice" column has more than 2,000 buyers leave reviews, which is the most popular of his three columns, and this is already the top of the knowledge column of zhihu.
According to the financial report, in the third quarter of 2021, the average monthly paid users of Zhihu were 5.5 million, which accounted for 5.43% of the total monthly active users of Zhihu in the same period of 101.2 million. Browsing user reviews shows that a significant proportion of paid members come to read online texts. "Share the story you just made up" was a proper derogatory thing in the past, but now, knowing that it has been promoted, even made part of the membership value.
From the whole site refusing to allow users to make up stories to accepting and encouraging users to create story content, it only took nearly a year.
At the beginning of 2019, the big V departure incident occurred again. The provocateur this time is the "Rabbit Tearing Chicken Big Boss". The creator told Interface News at that time that at the end of 2018, he had communicated with Zhihu and hoped that his "story vending machine" column could get support, but it did not get as he wished, and after he issued a job-hopping declaration, he gathered more than 200 Zhihu big V in two hours.
At least this shows that before the end of 2018, Zhihu does not pay attention to or even reject story works. But Zhihu soon changed his attitude, and the landmark event was a call for essay contest called "Personal Experience Stories" launched by Zhihu in November 2019, which officially entered the field of online literature.
This is not simply to cater to the unilateral propositions of creators such as the rabbit tearing chicken master, it is also a serious view of the needs of community users. It is no longer so important to know whether the management team likes it or not, and it is very important for users after breaking the circle to like it. Since the core purpose of breaking the circle is commercialization, and story online articles can bring more traffic, can achieve better commercialization, and can also charge, then why not?
The launch of the network text is a representative of many expansion actions. It is a self-persuasion of Zhihu, and at the same time a kind of abandonment of Zhihu's earlier position. And this makes zhihu product more and more presents a sense of separation for users: I come to know what it is for?
03
It is difficult to become a vibrato B station
Whether to take the route of more emphasis on advertising or the route of more value-added services depends on what the platform uses to retain users.
Yokobi B station and Zhihu will see a lot of differences. The most intuitive point is that a large number of users of Station B really love Station B, and they are willing to provide power for it by paying for it, but do users who know it really love to know it? Compared with the two, Zhihu is closer to an information platform.
According to the financial report, in the third quarter of 2021, the value-added service revenue of Station B based on live broadcasting and large members was 1.91 billion yuan, an increase of 95.1% year-on-year, accounting for 36.7% of the total revenue, which is its first major source of income; and as we have mentioned earlier, we know that the largest source of income is general advertising, so it is inevitable to exert traffic, and the way and method test the judgment and trading level of the management team.
It is also necessary to mention the extreme importance of the platform user's mind, and the user's mind cannot be achieved overnight, it is often slowly simmered through a long period of time.
Taking content video as an example, in this regard, zhihu may have similarities with Weibo: the purpose of users logging on to Weibo is mainly to see hot searches and comments, and content video makes Weibo look more fashionable, but this has never been the main reason for users to use Weibo.
Zhihu first needs to answer two questions: if the user wants to kill time by swiping the video, then why doesn't he open the more entertaining Douyin Kuaishou; if the user wants to watch interesting and useful knowledge videos, then why doesn't he choose the B station?
This is not about the existence of possibilities, but about the user's preconceived cognition or will greatly delay the achievement of the expected effect, and even make these efforts futile in some old users.
The value of Zhihu is of course different among the users who pour in at different times. For the earliest users invited to register from January 2011 to March 2013, this is an expanded elite exchange group, where everyone has their own strengths and inspires each other; for users who contact the platform after the registration is open to the public in March 2013, it can broaden their horizons and increase their insights; and for users who have just learned about Zhihu since the end of 2019, this may be a noisy square to feel the various topics of success learning, emotional stories, entertainment gossip and so on.
The generalization of content is the path choice that Zhihu takes the initiative to do, because it is necessary to traffic, to break the circle, to meet the new needs of new users after breaking the circle, and in this regard, Zhihu and Douyin also have a comparison: they are to continue to expand the scale of users, provide content that different groups of users are interested in, and at the same time do their best to improve user stickiness and develop advertising models in the process. It's just that there is still a huge gap between the entertainment function and Vibrato, Weibo, etc.
If you take Zhihu to consume, Zhihu cannot be addictive, not only can it not be addictive, but its content system with deep graphics and texts as the core advantage is enough to dissuade every user who tries to use Zhihu as a pastime tool; if you look at Zhihu as a learning product, you will find that its knowledge density is seriously insufficient, the content is uneven, and the learning efficiency is very low.
This makes the two major commercialization directions of Zhihu, namely advertising and membership, form a contradictory development trend: if you want users to consume more advertising, you must provide more entertainment content that can kill time; if you want users to buy more members, you must vigorously build a quiet and professional community learning atmosphere, avoid the disturbance of entertainment content, and create a more favorable development environment for the knowledge-based big V, so that they can obtain better benefits.
Now Zhihu is already a hodgepodge of emotional content, paid online texts, knowledge products, etc. Going to the left is the entertainment vibrato, and going to the right is the knowledge of the B station. The user scale and user stickiness are obviously inferior to the opponent's knowledge, and it is difficult to become anyone.