Wen | Zhang Shule (Columnist of People's Daily And People's Post and Telegraph, Observer of Internet and Game Industry)
Knowing that it has been listed for a year, the burning money has not burned out of the hall.
On March 14, Zhihu released its unaudited financial report for the fourth quarter and full year of 2021.
According to the financial report, Zhihu's total revenue in 2021 was RMB2.959 billion, an increase of 119% year-on-year; the net loss was RMB1.299 billion, compared with RMB518 million in 2020, an increase of 150.95% year-on-year; and the adjusted (non-GAAP) net loss was RMB747 million, compared with RMB338 million in the same period of 2020, an increase of 121.36% year-on-year.
Knowing that it is in the embarrassing situation of increasing revenue and not increasing profits, the main reason is the increase in advertising costs and marketing expenses.
At the same time, Zhihu itself is also caught in the choice of content or efficiency.
At the beginning of 2021, Zhihu said that its long-term strategy is to create value for users with creators in various fields as the center; it plans to invest billions of yuan in cash and flow with a total value to continue to increase support for creators.
At the same time, many netizens believe that "Zhihu has become a concentrated place for story meetings and edge balls", "all kinds of garbage advertisements are packaged as professional answers, and the face is not wanted".
Negative user reviews mainly focus on the following points:
1. The content of the recommended page is vulgar and young, selling anxiety, no nutrition, and psychological disgust
2. The core need of users is to find answers, now it is difficult to find high-quality answers, "water posts" are many, and attention consumption is large
3. Entertainment paragraphs and professional answers, often mixed, very noisy, no classification
4. Ads are a bit much, and there is an ad for every 4 answers, affecting the user experience
In other words, high-quality content seems to be being overridden by all sorts of soft ads or word-of-mouth marketing.
In this regard, I know that I am still quite complacent.
Its financial report shows that "business solutions have become the engine of revenue growth", but this business is exactly what the above netizens criticized, and it is similar to the case of "manipulating word of mouth" named by 315 CCTV this year.
In this regard, Jia Jianliang, a reporter of The Times Weekly, had an exchange with Shule, and poor Dao thought:
Knowing that it is being "solved" by its own business plan, the prospects and money scenes are not bright at all.
1) The transformation of Zhihu is still in the exploration period, only burning money, not making money, and it is particularly easy to make users and creators disgusted.
Of course, the upgrading and transformation of the content direction is not achieved overnight, and the strategic change will not have an immediate effect on the revenue of the year.
In particular, the relevant strategies are essentially similar to those on other integrated content platforms, and it is more difficult to achieve strategic goals quickly under competitive pressure.
2) Zhihu's word of mouth will become the consumer nourishment of its word-of-mouth marketing.
Knowing that wanting to go from professional content to pan-knowledge content with professional background endorsement to break the circle is itself an embarrassing balance beam, especially knowing that iron fans are difficult to identify.
Whether word-of-mouth marketing is in line with the essence of the product requires the natural release of various types of word-of-mouth and analysis and evaluation to achieve a three-dimensional image.
The content platform is artificially manipulated, which can easily flatten the brand image, and to some extent, it will suppress some of the insights.
In essence, word-of-mouth marketing is the consumption of the original content quality and user groups, and its development space and growth are all consuming the existing foundation of zhihu, if the growth and expansion of zhihu cannot keep up with the consumption of the foundation, it will soon fall into a dilemma.
3) Zhihu CEO Zhou Yuan claimed that to make the small and beautiful old community bigger and stronger, the essence is to consume and consume its own users.
It should be noted that there is still a gap between advertising and content, so that user stickiness can be maintained and grown, rather than allowing user stickiness to be over-consumed by advertisements and content containing advertisements.