Wen | Zhang Shule (Columnist of People's Daily And People's Post and Telegraph, Observer of Internet and Game Industry)
As the largest knowledge quiz community in China, Zhihu Network was interviewed due to many problems such as information prohibited by laws and regulations from being published or transmitted.
Zhihu became the third company to be interviewed by the Beijing Municipal Cyberspace Administration in the last month of 2021 after Douban and Sina Weibo.
On the afternoon of December 20, the WeChat public account of "Netinfo Beijing" released a message saying that in view of the repeated occurrence of information prohibited by laws and regulations on Zhihu Network (hereinafter collectively referred to as "Zhihu"), it was ordered to immediately rectify and seriously deal with the relevant responsible persons.
Unlike Douban and Sina Weibo, the Beijing Municipal Cyberspace Administration did not issue specific fines to Zhihu, but instead filed a case for administrative punishment for its illegal acts. The person in charge of Zhihu said that the relevant functions were suspended during the rectification period.
But at the same time, it is worth worrying about the profit prospects of Zhihu.
In the third quarter of 2021, The average monthly active users of Zhihu were 101.2 million, an increase of 40.1% year-on-year, and the average number of monthly paid members was 5.5 million, an increase of 109.9% year-on-year.
But Zhihu still did not make a profit. In the third quarter of 2021, Zhihu's total revenue was 824 million yuan, an increase of 115.1% year-on-year; the adjusted net loss was 112 million yuan, an increase of 41.4% over the same period last year.
Zhihu is a Q&A community that started with words, and after its 10th anniversary, it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange on March 26, EST this year, but it suffered a break after the listing.
At the same time that Zhihu was interviewed and fermented, another piece of content about Zhihu became a hit on WeChat.
The title of the article is "I am Aichihu, but we can't pretend that nothing happened", and the author is a senior user who has been in Zhihu for 3132 days.
There is a paragraph in the text that reads, "'Must See' is an excellent answer to the official screening. But half of the respondents who ranked the top ten answers can no longer be counted as active creators of Zhihu."
The author concludes: "The old users of Zhihu are willing to use the 'atmosphere' to describe Zhihu. Most of them believe that it is precisely because the atmosphere of Zhihu is getting worse and worse that there are fewer and fewer creators of Zhihu. ”
What's wrong?
Can you still be a good one?
In this regard, Wang Xiaoran, a reporter from The Times Weekly, had an exchange with Shule, and poor Dao thought:
The reason why I know that it is different from the situation of Douban and Weibo is that its background color is still there, the dimensional wall is not broken, and it is not contaminated with too many social habits.
This is a double-edged sword, making it stable, but making it still impossible for the public to kiss.
Although it has been popularized in a certain sense, in fact, it is extended from the pan-professionalism of the past to the pan-popularization of the content dissemination audience.
The popularization of Zhou Yuan, founder, chairman and CEO of Zhihu, is actually the promotion of goods supplemented by high-quality content output.
The financial report data also shows that this business promotion model is more suitable for knowing the community ecology. In the third quarter, the revenue of the commercial content solutions business was 278.4 million yuan, an increase of 511.9% year-on-year, which has also become an important growth engine for the growth of Zhihu revenue.
Stability without chaos has become a boundary logic that knows how to expand carefully.
In its content production ecology, it still maintains the rhythm of knowledge output by pan-professional content creators, whether it is content recommendation, interaction intensity and core users' praise, it maintains its basic background.
At present, the background of Zhihu has not changed, the stickiness of core users is still extremely high, and the enthusiasm of core creators and the discourse structure with distinct Characteristics of Zhihu have also maintained their own "dimensional wall".
Its popularization, traffic and B station in the two-dimensional field have a similar orderly tension state, but in the profit model, compared with the rapid conversion of B station can be gamified, it has not found a more effective conversion scenario.
However, knowing the moderation and slowness of the performance can also ensure that it will not be lost in the noise of the gods.
This is worthy of praise.
Therefore, the slow expansion of its commercialization is a steady growth, and it should also ensure a stable and uniform speed in content to ensure the "passing" of content and reliable quality.
This, Zhihu has been slow and not too anxious, and will be the same in the future, but this also makes Zhihu's content solidified, creators solidified, and slowly stiffened.