Author 丨dai Congfei
"I open Zhihu mainly now to read novels."
Many users expressed similar views to whippers, and did not know what kind of expression The founder Zhou Yuan would have after hearing such an experience.
"Sense of gain" is the yardstick given by Zhihu this year to measure the value of content. In a recent speech, Zhou Yuan analyzed it in more detail.
In his view, high-quality content has three characteristics for users: broadening their horizons, bringing help, and resonating. The three fall under one concept, that is, a sense of gain. Subsequently, Zhou Yuan also cited the "Rainstorm Self-Help Manual" some time ago and an example of the college entrance examination answer.
From this dimension, novels do not seem to be high-value content in most cases, but the graphics represented by novels do enrich the content ecology of Zhihu. That "small and fine" Q&A platform has become a "big and general" content community.
And Zhihu is not shy about such changes, and even has some "obsession" with the "B Hu" that users ridicule.
According to Tianyan, in March 2020, Zhihu filed two applications for the "B Hu" trademark, the international classifications of scientific instruments and education and entertainment, both of which were rejected in September. However, Zhihu did not give up on this and subsequently submitted the review information.
With one of the recent reviews rejected again, it is not yet known when Zhihu's "B Hu" dream will be achieved, but it is a fact that Zhihu has begun to move towards the B side after ten years.
From video to commercialization, eleven-year-old Zhihu is trying to tell a "sexy" content business, but the market will deny that it will take time to test.
So far, at least, the answer is clearly not enough for investors to smile and accept it. As of the last trading day, Zhihu's stock price has fallen by $5.84 from the issue price of $9.5.
From Zhihu to "Bhu"
In 2011, Zhihu was launched; in 2013, Zhihu opened registration.
From that moment on, Zhihu was destined to drift away from the label of "elite", but whether it could successfully go to the general public was unknown.
In a sense, the Zhihu Big V Gathering in 2013 is indeed a distribution center for professional science popularization, providing a valuable platform for registered users in the early open period to absorb knowledge and nourishment. In this case, although the scale of Zhihu's users is not large, the high degree of user stickiness and participation is rare.
In 2014, Zhihu held the first "Zhihu Salt Club" activity. Zhihu shang still has an article written by former Zhihu market employees at that time: "Zhihu Salt Club 2013", applauding you seriously. The author enthusiastically listed the 2013 Zhihu 300 questions, covering a variety of professional questions such as how to evaluate iOS 7 and what scientific errors there were in the movie "Gravity".
However, what makes people sigh is that the user's Zhihu account has now been deactivated, and the Zhihu 300 Questions has also drawn a rest after the 2018 year.
Early user Liu Yao, who was once a loyal fan of Zhihu, signed up for the "Zhihu Salt Club" activity in 2017 and shared her joy in the QQ space. However, due to various reasons, Liu Yao missed the opportunity to participate. To this day, her regret at describing this past is still overflowing.
Together with zhihu's annual 300 questions, it is the "elite" label and professional content that Zhihu advertises. With the increasing number of users and commercial demand, Zhihu began to appear "jittery" type of answer, and the phenomenon of bad currency expelling good money gradually appeared.
In 2017, there was news that today's headlines poached 300 Zhihu big Vs. In response, Zhihu responded: "Whether from the atmosphere of the site or the background data, the incident has not affected us, and high-quality content producers are still continuing to produce and share high-quality content." ”
The latter did not create the next "Zhihu" in the end, which may not affect the content ecology of Zhihu in the short term. However, the departure of the big V has a long-term impact on the content ecology of Zhihu later.
The zhihu, which was originally called the "elite community", is already full of "stories" and novels. In October 2020, Zhihu directly launched the "Story" column in the member column to encourage creators to publish original novels. More than one zhihu member user told the whipper that the main purpose of opening a membership was to read novels.
From "elite" to "story meeting", from Zhihu to "B hu", even Zhihu himself began to slowly accept such a transformation.
In March 2020, Zhihu submitted an application for registration of the "B Hu" trademark. On April 1, April Fool's Day, Zhihu turned on the "B Hu" mode for a limited time, which means "the B side of Zhihu", covering B hu videos, strange knowledge increases, how to gracefully raise the bar and other columns.
Objectively speaking, Zhihu is still the best platform that many users think of when they encounter problems. He Wen, who plans to do e-commerce, told Whiplash that it is much more convenient to find answers to certain professional problems than the dazzling content and advertisements on Baidu. He Wen is actually a customer of Baidu APP, but for her, Baidu is more of an information platform.
Although the Slogan of "Baidu, you will know" is still in her ears, in her opinion, even if Zhihu's ads continue to challenge the bottom line of users, in comparison, it is still friendlier than Baidu.
At the beginning of 2021, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Zhihu, Zhihu updated the slogan of "there is a problem, the upper zhihu" to "if there is a problem, there will be an answer". This change may also be based on both content and user considerations.
However, as more and more questions and answers are dominated by the "people in the United States, just got off the plane" jokes, early user loss will become a necessity.
The road to video
In March this year, Zhihu, who had just turned 10 years old, completed the "feat" of listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Unfortunately, on the first day of listing, it suffered an embarrassing situation of breaking, and at one point it plunged 27% intraday to close at $8.5, a decline of more than 10%.
Obviously, the capital market needs to provide more stories, and Zhihu is not unprepared. The previous "B-hu" model has implied the future that Zhihu provides to the outside world. In those weird columns, B-hu video is probably the most serious feature.
In the prospectus, Zhihu regards video as one of the important strategies in the future. After the listing of Zhihu, Zhou Yuan also said that he would continue to carry out the video strategy to further promote the growth of the content community.
The covetousness of video dates back to 2017. At that time, the short video wave had just struck, and Zhihu launched the video function.
In June 2018, Zhihu homepage added a "video" area on the basis of the original "Attention", "Hot List" and "Recommendation". However, at that time, this version was randomly open to some users in the form of internal testing.
In November 2018, Zhihu quietly tested a short video APP that was instantly filmed, but because it failed to achieve the established product goal, it only survived for half a year before terminating the service. The "video" area of Zhihu internal testing was also removed from the home page because of a piece of opposition, and instead interspersed in the recommendation page.
But Zhihu is obviously not willing to give up the user increase that video may bring. In October 2020, the Zhihu video area was once again launched on the homepage.
In the 2021 Q1 earnings conference, Zhou Yuan confirmed the user's love for video by the penetration rate of video consumption users in THE DAU reached 30%. "People really like to watch videos in Zhihu." Zhou Yuan said.
However, this infiltration may be more likely to be forced: knowing that the increasing support for video is so strong that users have to accept it. One obvious piece of evidence is: in Zhihu, there is a "how to look at the Zhihu homepage strong push video?" The answer to the question is almost entirely against the voice.
"I didn't come to see the video." "I came to see the answer, but I desperately wanted me to learn how to dress." "Thanks to the revision of Zhihu, you can brush less Zhihu in the future and save time to do something else."
Although the opposition is still there, Zhihu obviously can't take care of so much. It needs to confirm its future growth potential through the expansion of the content system.
Zhou Yuan mentioned in the Q1 earnings meeting, "I think that each zhihu answer will have a corresponding video version, and the graphics and videos are part of the content system." ”
On October 29, Zhihu launched the co-creation function, which further narrowed the distance between graphics and videos, and moved towards the goal of Zhou Yuan's "graphics and texts achieving video".
On December 13, Zhou Yuan announced that it would fully launch version 8.0 of Zhihu, in which the video was once again raised to "status". The home page interface is only left with three columns: "Video", "Recommendation" and "Hot List". At the same time, Zhou Yuan mentioned that the 8.0 version is internally called the "Exploration Edition", along with other "Easter Egg" versions.
On December 16, the 8.0 version of Zhihu was officially launched. Whiplash found in a previous version of the "Easter Egg" that Zhihu changed "my" in the Tab column to "just", while adding a "Zhihu hot search" similar to Weibo hot search, and updated every ten minutes. That is to say, Zhihu emphasizes "timeliness", but there is naturally a contradiction between hardcore and timeliness, and it remains to be seen whether such an attempt can bring a breakthrough to Zhihu.
Whether it is "video" or "timeliness", these practices have only one purpose: to improve the scale and stickiness of users.
So, how effective is it? Some users once wittily ridiculed, "The knowledge of the US stock listing has not been investigated because the data is unreliable." Of course, this statement is nonsense, but it can also be seen from it that everyone is not optimistic about Zhihu.
For user data, Zhihu mentioned in the Q3 financial report that the average monthly active users (MAUs) reached 101.2 million, an increase of 40.1% year-on-year. Interestingly, zhihu does not mention daily active users (DAUs), which is reminiscent.
QM data shows that the average MAU in Q3 increased by 27% year-on-year, 6% month-on-month;D AU increased by 6% year-on-year and decreased by 2% month-on-month. In the past 1 year, the year-on-year growth of Zhihu DAU has shown a significant downward trend.
Source: Tianfeng Securities Research Report
It can be speculated that this is mostly due to the fact that while attracting new users through video, the stickiness of the original users continues to decline, or even lose.
The commercialization conundrum remains to be solved
"Video" is to know the growth future of the outside world, and the commercialization process is to know the profit prospects that need to be outlined. At present, Zhihu can lose money, but the market cannot accept that "Zhihu has not made money".
As early as 2017, Zhihu began the journey of commercialization. However, so far, the amount of loss of Zhihu is still in the expansion stage, and the financial report shows that in Q3 of 2021, the net loss of Zhihu was 269.8 million yuan, an increase of 145.27% year-on-year.
On the eve of the listing in 2020, many users have already felt the anxiety of knowing that they are monetizing, the speed of increase in the number of advertisements is staggering, and the user experience has become significantly worse.
In the Q1 earnings meeting, Zhihu CFO Sun Wei said that for a long time in the future, the advertising load rate will remain at a stable level. Sun Wei said that the main core drivers of future advertising revenue growth are user growth and the improvement of brand recognition.
In fact, the current ad load rate of Zhihu is close to the 15% ceiling that is widely believed in the industry. Just recently, there are users on the pulse of the spit "know poor crazy? Answer the first place to put ads? The comment area is also quite harmonious: "I don't need to know it for a long time, it's all advertising, commercial advertising, and the respondents are all advertisements" "The answer is also full of advertisements with goods."
We do not deny that Zhihu will keep its promises, but such external evaluations have to make people question the brand degree of Zhihu.
In addition to advertising, Q3, other business revenue including e-commerce services was 45.7 million yuan, an increase of 202.6% year-on-year; content commerce solutions revenue was 278.4 million yuan, an increase of 511.87% year-on-year.
Zhou Yuan said in the earnings report meeting that as a content platform, the impact on consumer decisions is becoming increasingly significant. More and more brand merchants are also participating.
In the case of advertising revenue began to hit the ceiling, e-commerce is aware of the business prospects transmitted to the outside world. Zhou Yuan said that the business model of our e-commerce business is constantly exploring and evolving, and it will maximize the efficiency of monetization. At the same time, Zhihu will also explore the closed-loop e-commerce platform model in the community.
For Zhihu's exploration in the field of e-commerce, Zhuang Shuai, founder of Bailian Consulting, said that the opportunities for Zhihu lie in the content and user base. Zhuang Shuai mentioned that we know that the current e-commerce competition on the mobile terminal is not the annual active users, but the daily active users, and users will continue to use a platform. According to his understanding, there are currently three main types of such platforms, one is social; the other is content including short videos, Zhihu Q&A and Xiaohongshu graphics; and the third is games. He said that since users of these platforms log in every day, conversion rates and repurchases will be guaranteed.
However, as mentioned earlier, although Zhihu, which continues to expand its content and increase its video layout, has achieved steady growth in MAU, the DAU data is not eye-catching. In this case, it is not easy to know that it is not easy to do a good job in e-commerce, and the increasing proportion of e-commerce business will also have a certain impact on the user experience.
From the "richness" of content forms to the rapid expansion of commercialization, the demand for profitability is beyond reproach. However, knowing that such a "siege of the city" will expand the content ecology, or will it exhaust the fish?
At the request of the interviewees, except for Zhuang Shuai, the names in the text are pseudonyms.
This content is original to Whips and may not be reproduced without authorization