Analysis of Zhihu’s operation and promotion strategies!

On August 12, 2019, Zhihu completed its F round of financing led by Kuaishou, followed by Baidu, and with the original investors continuing to follow up. This round of financing raised US$434 million. After this round of financing, Zhihu's valuation was US$3.5 billion. What content operation strategies did Zhihu adopt to build its content empire and make it so popular? This article briefly discusses this.

Table of contents

1. Product Overview

1.1 Market Analysis

1.2 Product Introduction

1.2.1 Product logo

1.2.2 Product slogan

1.2.3 Current product version

1.2.4 Main product development nodes

1.3 Product Positioning

1.4 Product Status

2. User Analysis

2.1 User Profile

2.2 User Requirements

3. Content Operation Strategy Analysis

3.1 Product Architecture

3.2 Introduction to product modules

3.2.1 Introduction to the “Home” module

3.2.2 Introduction to the “Membership” module

3.2.3 Introduction to the “+” Release Module

3.2.4 Introduction to the "Message" module

3.2.5 Introduction to the “My” module

3.2.6 Search Module Introduction

3.3 Production and dissemination of content

3.3.1 Content Positioning

3.3.2 Content Production

3.3.3 Content Flow

3.4 Solutions to key issues

3.4.1 How to select good content

3.4.1.1 How to select good content - from the perspective of product design

3.4.1.2 How to select good content - from technical means

3.4.1.3 How to select good content - content standards and guidance

3.4.1.4 How to select good content - identification, recommendation and integration by operators

3.4.1.5 How to select good content - building a user growth rights system

3.4.1.6 How to select good content - user participation in community building

3.4.2 How to achieve commercialization

3.4.2.1 How to achieve commercialization - membership payment

3.4.2.2 How to achieve commercialization - advertising and knowledge marketing

3.5 New Media Operation

3.6 Brand Operation

IV. Summary, Suggestions and Outlook

4.1 Summary

4.2 Recommendations

4.3 Outlook

1. Product Overview

1.1 Market Analysis

Nowadays, with the rapid development of the Internet, a huge information explosion has occurred. The advantage is that the information that everyone can access has greatly increased, but there are also disadvantages, which are mainly reflected in the proliferation of information, information overload, information waste, and psychological problems caused by information. People need a way to solve these problems.

In the past, we relied on products such as encyclopedias and Baidu searches to find information, but these methods made it difficult to find high-quality content.

Moreover, in the era of mobile Internet, many UGC or PGC contents are encapsulated in information islands formed by different APPs. It is difficult to solve the problem of obtaining information or content by relying on search engines. Therefore, there is a need for a platform that can solve netizens' problems and meet the needs of mass content consumption. Zhihu's slogan "If you have any questions, go to Zhihu" is aimed at this point.

(Source: iiMedia Research)

In addition, according to surveys, more than 70% of Chinese netizens do not know how to find and solve problems online in most cases. Paying for knowledge is an optional way to solve this problem.

From the perspective of netizens' motivation for paying for knowledge, obtaining targeted professional knowledge, saving time and energy, and improving themselves are the main reasons why users pay for knowledge.

In summary, high-quality knowledge platforms are becoming more and more popular among users.

(Source: iiMedia Research)

It is precisely because of users' demand for knowledge-based content platforms that a variety of knowledge products have exploded. There are graphic, audio, video, live broadcast and question-and-answer products in the form of products, and the business model is mainly advertising and knowledge payment. Mainstream knowledge products at home and abroad are as follows:

(Source: iiMedia Research)

As can be seen from the figure below, the number of users of knowledge-based products has maintained a steady and continuous growth, and users' requirements for the efficiency of information acquisition and the quality of information are becoming increasingly higher.

(Source: iiMedia Research)

From the perspective of the competitive market, as a content product, from a macro perspective, Zhihu has to compete with all content products; from a micro perspective, it has to compete with paid knowledge-based apps such as Duoduo, NetEase and Tencent's live classrooms, Himalaya audio and video, and e-book reading apps.

However, thanks to Zhihu's years of hard work in cultivating community atmosphere and high-quality content, it has firmly occupied the top spot in the list of knowledge content products.

1.2 Product Introduction

1.2.1 Product logo

1.2.2 Product slogan

1.2.3 Current product version

Zhihu iOS Version 6.11.0(1492)

1.2.4 Main product development nodes (source: Baidu Index, Encyclopedia, etc.)

The Zhihu website was launched in December 2010 .

In March 2011 , Zhihu received angel round investment from Kai-Fu Lee, and later received A round investment.

During the cold start phase, Zhihu adopted an invitation-plus-certification registration method, using this high-threshold method to screen seed users, ensuring that seed users are a group of high-quality elites with great influence in their respective industries, and using Weibo binding to expand product dissemination.

Under the leadership of Mr. Kai-Fu Lee and the operation team, the seed user group outputs high-quality and valuable opinions. This determined the initial content tone of Zhihu: high quality and original.

At the same time, this creates a cool and attractive image for outsiders who want to join this elite circle.

In March 2013 , Zhihu opened registration to the public.

High-quality seed users and content are very attractive to the outside world.

Therefore, after Zhihu completely opened registration, the number of registered users quickly climbed from 400,000 to 4 million in less than a year.

In March 2018 , Zhihu was removed from all major app stores for a week.

After the number of users increases dramatically, the quality of community content will inevitably be diluted. At this time, the management of community personnel and content is of paramount importance.

After this lesson, Zhihu carried out a comprehensive upgrade of its community management regulations, comment system and security review system.

On April 26, 2018 , Zhihu announced the launch of an upgrade in user rights protection. For third-party organizations other than trusted search engines, a whitelist licensing approach will be adopted to regulate the use of Zhihu content.

After growing to a certain stage, Zhihu has standardized the use of Zhihu content to ensure that the content on the site is not easily leaked. At the same time, by paying attention to and taking actions on copyright, it protects the legitimate rights and interests of Zhihu users and improves their user experience.

To create a better foundation for subsequent commercialization, the commercialization process includes the entry of brand agencies and big Vs, paid consulting, content payment, knowledge marketing, etc.

In March 2019 , Zhihu officially announced the launch of Yanxuan Membership, a new membership service system.

The upgrade of the membership operation system focuses on three dimensions: high-value paid content rights, community function rights, and member users' identity rights. Moreover, the value-added benefits provided by Yanxuan members will not affect the order of the Zhihu community itself and the fairness of the question and answer ranking.

On August 12, 2019 , Zhihu received a strategic investment of approximately US$450 million in its F round from Kuaishou and Baidu.

Hundreds of millions of questions and answers on Zhihu will be integrated into the Baidu APP in the form of smart mini-programs, and will be personalized and distributed to users with different interests through AI technology in Baidu search and information flow.

1.3 Product Positioning

Zhihu is a high-quality Internet question-and-answer sharing community. In the community, it brings together professionals from all walks of life, and users get answers by asking questions and inviting answers.

There are many topics on it, such as military, economy, games, technology, etc. Under each topic there are many questions (the topic to which the question belongs is generally generated by the person asking the question adding a tag when asking the question or the APP extracts the question keywords, and up to 5 topic tags can be added), as well as articles written around the topic in columns set up by users. Users can discuss and share questions or articles around a certain topic.

Compared with the explanations of conceptual terms in online encyclopedias, Zhihu focuses more on professional answers to divergent and hot issues by industry veterans.

As a content-based product, Zhihu will have different product positioning and content positioning based on product positioning at different stages of development, which will bring about changes in operational strategies and directions.

1. During the cold start period, Zhihu was a niche product in an elite circle. Its slogan was "Share your knowledge, experience and insights with the world" and it focused on letting big Vs actively output valuable insights and knowledge in their minds.
2. In the growth stage, the number of users increased dramatically due to the opening of registration, and Zhihu released the potential energy of the content it had accumulated. At this time, it wanted to make users more sticky to the product and arouse their curiosity, so its slogan was "Discover a bigger world";
3. The slogan in the mature stage has changed to "If you have any questions, go to Zhihu", which places more emphasis on its value to users, that is, using the form of question-and-answer format for users to help each other or pay for knowledge to solve users' real-life problems.

1.4 Product Status

As of January 2019, Zhihu has over 220 million users and has accumulated over 130 million answers.

From the perspective of the product life cycle, Zhihu, as a UGC community, has entered its mature stage. The key KPIs that are focused on at this stage include the number of content published, the number of new content, the number of high-quality content, and the number of content shared and interacted.

As a mature product, Zhihu faces the following problems:

(1) Commercialization Dilemma

Zhihu’s current commercialization methods mainly include membership fees, advertising and knowledge marketing. Advertisements make up the bulk of Zhihu's commercial monetization, and are present in all Q&A, comments, information flows, and searches except for the most popular question on the entire site. This has an impact on user experience (even Zhihu members cannot remove ads).

In addition, membership payment and knowledge marketing have not been effective. Zhihu wants to achieve knowledge sharing, but the essence of knowledge payment is to realize commercialization by creating knowledge asymmetry, which is exactly the opposite of Zhihu's positioning and tone.

The paid knowledge on Zhihu does not have its own characteristics and exclusivity, and is no different in essence from that on apps such as Get. Moreover, because Zhihu is slow to commercialize, it cannot compare in terms of time and accumulation.

(2) After the community grows, how can we ensure the quality of community content? What management methods can we use to create harmony among users? How can we ensure that high-quality content can be presented as soon as possible?

In fact, as the number of users grows and the user groups become more diverse, the question is how Zhihu can continue to build a positive and healthy community atmosphere, establish a unique tone, and serve as an invisible moat for the content community.

(3) How to realize the value of high contributors

Some of the big Vs are happy to share their knowledge for free, but some others think that the high-quality answers or articles they spend a lot of time and energy writing have brought popularity to Zhihu and earned advertising revenue for Zhihu, but they themselves have not gained much benefit. The several times that big Vs left or were poached from Zhihu were caused by this dilemma.

2. User Analysis

2.1 User Profile

Geographical distribution of Zhihu users (Source: Baidu Index)

It can be seen that Zhihu users are mainly distributed in developed coastal areas, and most of them live in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Attributes of Zhihu users (Source: Baidu Index)

Data description: People under 19 years old account for 20%, users between 20 and 29 years old account for 70%, users between 30 and 39 years old account for 9%, and the rest of the users account for 1%; in terms of gender, male users account for 67% and female users account for 33%.

It can be seen that Zhihu users tend to be younger overall, and the content tends to be rational and serious.

Zhihu user interest distribution (Source: Baidu Index)

Data description: Zhihu users come from a wide range of industries and have a wide range of interests. Compared with ordinary netizens, they prefer education and training, book reading, home appliances and digital products.

Educational background distribution of Zhihu users (Source: iResearch)

Data description: More than 80% of the people have a bachelor's degree or above.

Data summary of Zhihu users:

1. Region: First-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen or developed coastal cities;
2. Age: Nearly 70% of users are between 20 and 29 years old, which is relatively young overall;
3. Gender: 67% of all users are male and 33% are female;
4. Education: Bachelor's and Master's degrees are the main requirements;
5. Occupation: mainly white-collar workers and college students;
6. Income: Those who already have a job have a higher income, with a monthly salary of 15k~30k; those who are still studying have a lower income but a higher desire for knowledge;
7. Interests: Compared with the general Internet users, Zhihu users are more interested in and pursue information, film, television, music, education and training, and book reading.

Cause Analysis:

1. Zhihu has created a high-quality, high-style elite content community since its cold start period. This tone determined at the beginning attracted new users with the same preferences to join, and even when registration was opened later, it was still influenced by this gene. Therefore, the educational background of Zhihu users is mostly those with high education, and the age group is mostly between 30 and 39 years old.
2. As an Internet product, Zhihu was first used by Internet celebrities such as Kai-Fu Lee and Ma Huateng, which attracted young people in the Internet industry and college students. This group of people has a strong curiosity and is familiar with the Internet. Therefore, in terms of occupation, it is mainly white-collar workers and college students, and their income is relatively high.
3. Most Zhihu users live in coastal cities, where they face great competition and life pressure. They pursue career development and lifelong learning, so Zhihu users have greater pursuits in information, film, television, music, reading and learning than the general public.

2.2 User Requirements

Definition of the new middle class: between 25 and 40 years old, mainly living in first-, second- and third-tier cities, with medium-to-high levels of consumption capacity and willingness on the mobile Internet. They hope to gain income and social status through their own skills and knowledge.

As can be seen from the figure below, Zhihu has a large overlap with the knowledge-based middle class. The two groups have similar characteristics, but Zhihu users tend to be younger.

As the middle class faces pressure of self-growth, ability improvement and workplace competition, they develop knowledge anxiety and are more eager to read and pay for knowledge.

(Source: Baidu Index)

Based on the crowd portrait of Zhihu users, the following characteristics can be extracted:

(Source: iiMedia Research)

Zhihu users are those who pursue quality life and are knowledgeable middle class. There is a large group of young people. They have the following demands on products:

Basic needs

1. For any problems or questions you encounter, you can get answers from experienced people by asking questions or searching the internal content of the APP;
2. For hot events, there can be timely, effective and high-quality discussions and interpretations;
3. Ability to discover and learn new and authoritative knowledge;
4. Ability to have friendly and quality discussions with people who share the same concerns or issues;
5. Actively share your knowledge with others and gain psychological satisfaction through their likes and reposts.

Expected demand

1. You can find industry veterans on Zhihu and communicate and learn with them through paid or free methods;
2. Ability to output and build personal brand for oneself or company and create commercial value (knowledge marketing) by continuously writing answers, columns or comments;
3. You can achieve self-improvement and improve your competitiveness in the workplace.

Charm Requirement

1. The articles or Q&A pushed by the product happen to be what you are eager to know;
2. Output a personal improvement plan or project plan tailored for yourself from the platform's massive learning courses, materials and content;
3. Through a content-based question-and-answer community like Zhihu, you can gain a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction, and self-realization.

3. Content Operation Strategy Analysis

This section mainly analyzes the content operation strategy of Zhihu APP, which is in its mature stage, based on its main functions and modules, including the content types, production, organization, presentation and circulation of Zhihu.

3.1 Product Architecture

Zhihu is a question-and-answer content product designed around the production, organization, presentation and consumption of UGC content.

Zhihu released version 6.0 in June, which made major adjustments to the product architecture, and is moving towards better content presentation, simpler products, and better commercial monetization.

The main architecture diagram of Zhihu mobile terminal

It is more convenient for users to post articles or write answers on the PC web version, so the PC web version is a major entrance to Zhihu.

On August 15, 2019, Zhihu finally made major improvements to the web version that had been used for several years. It redesigned the information navigation and information flow display, greatly improving the user experience.

The main architecture diagram of Zhihu Web

Diagram of Zhihu's main modules

In version 6.0, Zhihu adjusted its main functional modules into five modules: Home, Members, “+” Release, Messages and My. Originally, the ideas in the previous version occupied a first-level entrance, but in version 6.0, they were merged and hidden under the focus.

3.2 Introduction to product modules

3.2.1 Introduction to the “Home” module

The homepage module is the core scenario for all Zhihu users to consume content. It has three secondary tabs: Follow, Recommend, and Hot List.

When clicking Follow, users can also select All, Only Original, and Only Ideas in the drop-down list. In the hot list, users can choose to view popular questions in different category lists by clicking.

In the homepage module, Zhihu adopts the typical architecture of a content platform, namely the three tabs of attention, recommendation and hot list corresponding to social, algorithm and list respectively.

Following generates weak social interaction, where users can see various dynamics of the people they follow, such as questions, answers, articles, and ideas. Recommendation is a set of algorithms built based on user behavior and user portraits, which helps users discover more content that matches their interests and preferences, and allows non-followed and non-hot long-tail content to receive more exposure.

The hot list is an arrangement of hot content based on big data. Compared with the old version, Zhihu has launched sub-lists of science, digital, people's livelihood, sports, fashion, film and television, and campus in version 6.0 in addition to the entire site, making content classification clearer and user selection more convenient.

Zhihu combines social networking, algorithms and rankings to make content recommendations and presentations more high-quality.

Because if you only rely on following, the outer circle of users' exposure to other users and content will become smaller. If we rely solely on algorithms, the "information cocoon" problem will arise. In the long run, it will make it difficult for users to feel surprised, and thus cause them to feel disgusted. If we rely solely on rankings, it will be difficult to present long-tail content that is of high quality but not popular, and users' personalized needs cannot be met.

3.2.2 Introduction to the “Membership” module

The "Membership" module has two main functions:

1. Organization and presentation of member content. As can be seen from the figure below, Zhihu has launched a lot of high-quality content for paying users, and has classified them into different categories. In addition, in "Yanxuan+XX", certain algorithm recommendations are made based on user behavior and tags.
2. Zhihu and big Vs are an important channel for commercial monetization.

Zhihu has two major business models, one is membership payment, and the other is advertising. This is reflected in the scenarios of value-added services, knowledge payment and knowledge marketing. The "membership" module corresponds to membership payment, and it is also the main way for Zhihu big Vs to monetize on Zhihu. Zhihu prevents the loss of high-quality users by binding interests.

3.2.3 Introduction to the “+” Release Module

“+” is the main entrance for users to post content. In terms of design, Zhihu adopts a design with large blank space and frosted glass as the background. It creates a comfortable environment for users and tries not to interrupt the users' thoughts when posting content.

In this module, users can choose "Answer a question", "Ask a question", "Write an article" and "Post ideas", and the content type can be a combination of pictures, text and videos.

Among these four forms of content, the first three revolve around a central topic and are generally longer if they are of high quality.

"Ideas" are more of a fragmented, inspirational, non-question-and-answer, non-column short content creation, which is a bit like Weibo. Before version 6.0, there was a separate module. After version 6.0, the information flow was redesigned and merged into the focus of the homepage, and it was no longer pushed in recommendations, rankings, and messages.

The reason for the adjustment may be that it is difficult to produce high-quality content based on ideas. It may be friendly to big Vs because it can enable them to better operate their output, but it is not of much use to ordinary users.

Ideas occupied a valuable first-level entrance in the old version but did not generate much value, so they were adjusted in version 6.0.

3.2.4 Introduction to the "Message" module

The notification tab of the "Message" module is an important channel for pushing new questions, invitations to answer, column articles, and new answers to follow-up questions within the site.

The private message tab is the channel for the official to send messages, users to communicate privately, and provide paid consultation.

3.2.5 Introduction to the “My” module

It is mainly used to quantify and display users' operations, footprints and community activities on Zhihu.

The Zhihu salt value points and rights system designed allows users to participate in community building and improve community quality and user activity.

The "Public Arbitration Hall" was added in version 6.0. It selects a group of users as public arbitrators through certain rules to participate in resolving disputes within the site, so as to realize the self-construction of user communities.

3.2.6 Search Module Introduction

Search is an important way for users to actively discover content. You can enter the search by clicking the search bar above the homepage and my module. Zhihu provides users with the latest hot search list based on big data, and further subdivides the list. The film and television list is divided into different columns according to the film and television content, and the films in each column are made into special topics.

In addition, if users enter keywords to search, Zhihu will display all content related to it, including not only questions but also private lessons and so on. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, there are shortcut keys for asking questions below for users to use.

3.3 Production and dissemination of content

3.3.1 Content Positioning

In its early days, Zhihu was a high-quality elite community that adopted an invitation-based registration method to raise the entry threshold and promoted content circulation by binding with Weibo. These measures ensure the production of high-quality content and set an example and gene. Subsequent entrants will subconsciously abide by these norms due to the herd mentality.

After opening registration, Zhihu positioned itself as a high-quality Internet question-and-answer sharing community for the general public . Due to the influx of a large number of users, the quality of personnel and content will inevitably decline. When someone does not adhere to the tone of high-quality Q&A set at the beginning, such as giving witty answers, a broken window effect will occur.

How to find a good balance between the number and quality of users is Zhihu's long-term focus.

Creative and influential opinion leaders in various industries, as well as senior people with professional knowledge in a certain field, are the mainstream group that contributes high-quality questions and answers on Zhihu.

(Source: iiMedia Research)

All users on Zhihu can be divided into the following categories:

1. Ordinary users (95%): contribute a large number of questions, answers and comments, most of which are of low quality, but prosper the community;
2. Industry veterans (<5%): experienced and skilled industry experts who produce high-quality articles, Q&A and comments;
3. Influential elites (<<1%): opinion leaders in various industries, and contributors of high-quality Q&A;
4. Brands and official organizations (<<1%): The purpose is not to produce and share content, but to promote branding and push messages.

Zhihu's product positioning is: a high-quality Internet question-and-answer sharing community, that is, producing high-quality content in the form of questions and answers. As a UGC community, Zhihu plays more of a platform role.

for example:

1. Need to provide a place for users to post content;
2. Relying on product design and operation to encourage users to publish high-quality content that conforms to the core socialist values, and timely screen and present high-quality content that users like;
3. Establish community norms, constrain user behavior, and enable users to communicate in a friendly manner.

3.3.2 Content Production

Zhihu is a UGC community. More than 99% of the content is produced by users in the form of pictures, texts, and videos. Among them, pictures and texts account for more than 95%, while videos are relatively rare because they are difficult to produce and it is difficult to present high-quality content.

Users mainly publish content through the "+" module. The published content is classified into different ideas, topics or columns, and the content produced by users is pushed to users who follow the content.

3.3.3 Content Flow

The circulation of content is mainly divided into internal circulation and external circulation.

(1) Internal circulation

The four functional modules of the homepage module, namely attention, recommendation, list and search, are mainly used to present different UGC:

1. Follow and push questions, answers, ideas and articles of followers (including users, topics and special topics) to users;
2. Recommendation is to push content that meets user preferences based on user attributes and user behavior, and also push long-tail content that is not in the following and rankings;
3. The list uses big data to comprehensively calculate the latest and hottest concerns of users in the app;
4. Search pushes relevant content to users as they actively search for questions and answers.

After users see questions, answers, ideas and articles, they can answer and comment on them themselves, or write articles, which promotes the further production of content and forms a closed loop of content production-consumption-reproduction.

(2) External circulation

Official: Use WeChat and Weibo to push excellent and highly praised articles based on hot topics, and use Douyin and Kuaishou to transmit brands; use celebrity effects, such as Lang Lang opening piano lessons on Zhihu to attract everyone to watch;

Open the content on the site to search engines such as Baidu; use offline activities to organize, produce and disseminate content. Users: Spread the content on Zhihu by forwarding and quoting. Users can be directed to the Zhihu APP by clicking on or searching for these contents.

3.4 Solutions to key issues

At the current stage of Zhihu's development, there are two issues that need to be addressed and solved:

1. As the community grows, high-quality content is diluted;
2. The contradiction between commercialization, user experience and product tonality;

In response to the above two key issues, Zhihu has taken the following measures:

3.4.1 How to select good content

1. From the product design perspective;
2. From the technical aspect;
3. Content standards and guidance;
4. Identification, recommendation and integration of operational personnel;
5. Construction of user growth rights and interests system;
6. Users participate in community building.

3.4.1.1 How to select good content - from the perspective of product design

Under each answer, Zhihu has set up "Agree", "Disagree", "Thanks", "Favorites" and "Number of Comments", and there is a "Report" function in the menu bar in the upper right corner. Users can also "like" or "report" comments, and Zhihu will present the comments with more likes as featured comments.

There is a similar design for articles and ideas. If the answer is too short, or has a large number of reports or objections, Zhihu will fold the answer.

Based on the user's salt value, the system will assign different weights to each user. Users with different weights will give different weights to the content by labeling the content differently. The system will sort and display the content according to the weight, thus achieving the screening and recommendation of user help content through product design.

3.4.1.2 How to select good content - from technical means

On average, hundreds of thousands of answers, comments, and ideas are generated on Zhihu every day. Among them are both high-quality "real money" and many unfriendly contents that violate the core socialist values. It is difficult to filter out good content and eliminate low-quality and harmful content through conventional means.

After the rapid development of artificial intelligence, Zhihu introduced AI technology. In 2016, Zhihu launched the intelligent robot "Wall-E", which uses algorithms to identify and process unfriendly insults, irrelevant answers, and pornographic images and texts. Today, more than 95% of these unfriendly contents can be quickly identified and properly handled by WALL-E.

At the same time, Zhihu has also integrated algorithms into many details such as article and answer originality identification, image copyright identification, personal consultation identification, etc., in order to reduce the difficulty of "originality" for creators while screening out high-quality original content.

3.4.1.3 How to select good content - content standards and guidance

Zhihu has created a "Zhihu Agreement" as the community "law", which stipulates the community rules that community members must abide by, as well as the penalties for violations.

For newcomers, there is the "Zhihu Guide" as a guidance standard for newcomers, so that newcomers can quickly understand the community, learn and master the most critical community content standards. Its purpose is to tell newcomers what kind of content is allowed to be created and what kind of content is high-quality content.

Through agreements and guidelines, it is possible to reduce spam content at the source and promptly avoid user complaints and backlash caused by the cleaning of bad content.

3.4.1.4 How to select good content - identification, recommendation and integration by operators

Zhihu operators use active content presentation methods such as identification, tag recommendation, and similar question-and-answer integration for different content in different places. For example:

1. In the push position at the top of the APP, in the small pop-up window, labels such as "Discussing", "Hot Events", "Breaking News", and "Today's Hot Topics" are used;
2. Some questions in the list were labeled as "new", "recommended", "brand selection", "brain-opening", "New Pants personal answer" (the personal answer of the protagonist involved in the question), "+ number of answers" and so on;
3. The search used big data lists and labels such as "Editor's Recommendation" for the searched content;
4. Organize discussions on the same topic that occur intensively over a period of time into a special topic format;
5. For issues that a large number of users are concerned about, Zhihu will host roundtable discussions with industry veterans in related fields;
6. Integrate the popular and high-quality content of the day into the form of Zhihu Daily or Zhihu Evening News;
7. Operations staff proactively create topics and guide user discussions.

3.4.1.5 How to select good content - building a user growth rights system

A complete and mature user system can classify users, realize refined operations, promote new users, activity and consumption, and realize the commercial value of the product. At the same time, it can also allow users to gain a sense of accomplishment and benefits, achieving a win-win situation for products and users.

Based on the product features, Zhihu has built a salt value system and creator system that are closely related to the products. The salt value system is for all users, and its entry includes the following five aspects.

1. Basic credit: mainly to encourage users to improve their personal information, complete personal authentication, and become excellent respondents. Its functions include: allowing users to better showcase and package themselves, including their specialties, education, interests and hobbies, etc.; it is a kind of trust endorsement, allowing users to be responsible for their own behavior; it can serve as a sign for other users to make preliminary judgments and screen authors; through active user filling, user data can be better collected, laying the foundation for accurate content recommendations.
2. Content creation: including asking questions, answering questions, writing articles, and publishing ideas. The main purpose is to encourage users to take actions on the product, experience the core functions of the product, and prompt them to generate content.
3. Friendly interaction: Zhihu supports fierce collisions of different viewpoints, but strongly opposes personal attacks, and therefore advocates friendly interaction. It is mainly to create a good atmosphere for community discussion;
4. Comply with the convention: mainly to reduce illegal content;
5. Community building: includes three aspects: accurate reporting, public editing and weighted opposition. The main purpose is to allow users to participate in community building and promote the positive cycle of the community, while allowing users who do not produce a lot of content but actively maintain the community to stand out.

The export of the salt value system is mainly reflected in the rights and interests that can be enjoyed with different salt value points. The salt value rights and interests are divided into four categories: green channel, public editing, weighted support, and function enjoyment, with a total of 11 privileges. In addition, the salt value system is also connected with the recommendation and weight system.

In addition to the salt value system for the general public, Zhihu also has a "Creator Center" for creators, which is similar to self-media platforms such as Baijiahao and Toutiao.

Its main purpose is to use profit incentives to encourage creators to produce more high-quality, high-impact content and to slow down the loss of creators to other platforms.

Although Zhihu's early seed users spread knowledge with the idea of ​​sharing, not everyone is willing to give without asking for anything in return. Therefore, it is particularly important to build a system that can fully empower and serve high-quality content creators.

The Creator Center has set up 10 levels for creators, and there are 9 other rights and interests in total, including content analysis, question recommendation, copyright service, content self-recommendation, appreciation, Zhihu Live, customized promotion, author brokerage, and brand tasks. Different creator levels can unlock corresponding rights and interests.

The Zhihu platform itself has gathered a large number of content consumers, and the content produced by creators can be accurately recommended and digested directly on the site, unlike Baijiahao and Dayuhao which rely purely on algorithmic recommendation flow.

It is easier for creators to reach users on Zhihu. After receiving strategic investment from Baidu, their ability to reach users has obviously been taken to a higher level. Zhihu has also tailored rights and interests such as Zhihu Live and author agency for them, allowing them to better realize themselves on the Zhihu platform through writing books, publishing courses, and giving lectures.

In addition to building a user growth system, Zhihu has also designed a badge system to enhance user sense of accomplishment and encourage user use of the product, which will not be discussed in detail here.

3.4.1.6 How to select good content - user participation in community building

Zhihu is a UGC community. Users’ discussions and sharing create Zhihu’s core value. Interactions among users enliven the community. Users’ forwarding and likes promote the circulation of content. So users play an important role everywhere within the community.

The role of involving users in community building:

1. Using this down-to-earth approach to link the platform and users can increase user engagement and ultimately improve user activity;
2. Help operators screen content and reduce operating costs, especially for controversial topics;
3. It is an important means of ensuring that community issues are dealt with fairly and impartially;
4. The platform can work with users to promote the continuous evolution and improvement of community norms.

In order to allow users to participate in community building, Zhihu provides four functions: arbitration forum, public editing, reporting and opposition.

3.4.2 How to achieve commercialization

1. Membership fees;
2. Advertising and knowledge marketing.

Commercialization is the ultimate goal of all products. A good commercialization approach will not cause users to resist, but will achieve a win-win situation for users and products.

Zhihu's road to commercialization has not been smooth. It has explored many paths and launched commercialization methods such as Zhihu and Live lectures. In the current version, Zhihu's monetization model mainly includes membership payment, knowledge payment, knowledge marketing, and advertising.

3.4.2.1 How to achieve commercialization - membership payment

The people we connect with are mainly individuals. Member content is mainly produced by high-quality creators on Zhihu, a small part is provided by enterprises or companies (such as the e-book of "Xinmin Weekly"), and another part is produced on Zhihu by external famous creators invited by Zhihu. The consumers of the content are mainly Zhihu's general users.

The creator rights system mentioned earlier includes: answer appreciation, Zhihu Live, brand tasks, and author brokerage. The four major channels dedicated to monetization for creators are reflected here.

Zhihu has set up a dual membership system of Yanxuan members and reading members. Users who pay to become members can enjoy many resources and identity benefits. Only a small number of books and courses require additional payment.

The member content presented uses divided columns and a personalized recommendation algorithm to better suit the interests and needs of members.

3.4.2.2 How to achieve commercialization - advertising and knowledge marketing

Another way for Zhihu to commercialize is to take on hard advertising and knowledge marketing for brands and institutional accounts, connecting with government agencies, companies or enterprises.

Hard ads are mainly embedded in the homepage’s information flow, the list of answers to questions, below the selected comments of the answers, the search list, and the video stream.

There are two ways of knowledge marketing: first, to promote by asking questions (as shown in the figure below). Brands and organizations ask questions on Zhihu, and then invite high-quality users to answer them, which attracts the attention of relevant followers and ultimately achieves exposure. Second, write professional articles in the industry to create a knowledge brand, such as the large number of columns by "Dingxiang Doctor"; third, answer relevant questions as an answerer.

3.5 New Media Operation

Although Zhihu itself is a content operation platform, it also uses WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, and Kuaishou to push excellent content on the site to outside the site in combination with hot topics in order to reach more users and attract more traffic.

Among them, Weibo and WeChat mainly push high-quality articles or answers with high likes on the site, while Douyin and WeChat mainly push short videos that are in line with the tone of the push platform. However, judging from the number of followers and fans, it can be seen that the operations on Douyin or Kuaishou are not particularly good.

The reasons may be:

1. There is little overlap between the users of TikTok and Kuaishou and the users of Zhihu;
2. The correct way of dissemination was not found and the video content was not well produced.

3.6 Brand Operation

Zhihu’s mascot and cartoon character is a cute Arctic fox - Liu Kanshan. Zhihu continues to invest heavily to build it into a brand that is approachable and easy to spread.

In 2014, Zhihu introduced Liu Kanshan through an article titled "Hello, my name is Liu Kanshan". Later, Zhihu set up a special website for Liu Kanshan, applied for a Zhihu account for him, and launched exclusive comic stories, emoticons, wallpapers, avatars, input methods and peripheral products for him.

Liu Kanshan is everywhere in the product. In larger meetings or events, Zhihu also puts Liu Kanshan next to the brand to show people Zhihu's values ​​and brand image and deepen people's memory and impression.

Liu Kanshan's website

The image of Liu Kanshan

IV. Summary, Suggestions and Outlook

4.1 Summary

This article is divided into three major sections: product analysis, user analysis and content operation strategy analysis of Zhihu.

1. Product analysis mainly includes product overview, market analysis, product positioning and product status;
2. User analysis introduces Zhihu's user portraits and user needs;
3. In the content operation module, the important functional modules of Zhihu are first introduced, and then the whole process of Zhihu content positioning, content production and content circulation is analyzed;
4. Finally, we introduced the current problems Zhihu is facing and the solutions it has taken to these problems. Finally, we provided an introduction to Zhihu’s new media operations and brand operations.

As a content community product with 200 million "citizens", Zhihu's journey has been quite difficult. It has achieved continuous growth in users through continuous product optimization and iteration, as well as operations.

As the traffic dividend in first- and second-tier cities has almost peaked, Zhihu is also accelerating its expansion and commercialization. Zhihu can no longer return to its original elite small circle community. It must achieve a positive balance between content quality, number of users and commercialization process, while digging deep into and amplifying the value of each user and continuously creating value for the majority of users.

4.2 Recommendations

1. Creating topics and columns is the right of high-salt value users, but there are too many topics or columns on Zhihu, and some are repeated. For example, there are more than 100 military-related topics, and some topics are not popular at all, which makes it difficult for users to choose. Therefore, it is necessary to refine the criteria for creating topics or columns, and rely on the majority of users to edit and vote on topics to remove some repetitive topics.
2. The timeliness of questions and answers. This question has two aspects. First, if it is not a hot topic or the questioner is not influential enough, it usually cannot be answered in time (of course, Zhihu also provides users with a way to pay directly for consultation), which will discourage users' enthusiasm; second, questions and answers are time-sensitive. As time goes by, the context of the question may change, so high-quality answers with high praise may no longer be appropriate. There are many such repeated questions on Zhihu. When users search for questions and get content like this, it obviously cannot satisfy them. It is recommended to adopt the formatted question method of time + question; to merge and hide some questions through joint editing by everyone; and to improve the incentive mechanism.
3. How to better realize user value. Users ask questions and get answers from senior experts, which realizes the value of users. However, the questions are always limited. In other cases, Zhihu is just an app that allows users to read in fragmented time. Users get fragmented knowledge from reading a lot, which has an impact on building a systematic knowledge structure, and users do not get real growth.
4. Zhihu's growth in first- and second-tier cities has reached its ceiling, and it is accelerating the development of lower-tier markets and overseas users. The content produced by users in lower-tier markets is of lower quality, which has an impact on the product form. We can learn from Bilibili and conduct tests before publishing content. The exam content includes community guidelines, etc.
5. Zhihu has implemented a dual membership system, namely, salt value membership and reading membership. The two are billed separately and have different rights and interests, but users are not very clear about the differences between the two. Therefore, there is a need for more guidance and explanation, or for the two memberships to be merged.
6. There needs to be fair rules and regulations, and clear protocols for dealing with the consequences of different behaviors. For example, how to deal with insults and falsification respectively, and how to deal with big Vs and ordinary users. There should be no ambiguity in these.
7. Algorithms are reflected in all aspects of the product. Whether it is attention, recommendation or ranking, they are all the results of algorithm processing. Especially in the recommendation part, it is the way the algorithm presents content according to the user portrait. However, there can be more choices in algorithm application and product design. For example, is it possible to provide a switch to turn off algorithm recommendations, so that long-tail content can get more exposure and create more fun and surprises for users?

4.3 Outlook

Content, community and membership are the current directions for many products. Even powerful tool products such as Baidu Netdisk and WiFi Master Key are moving in this direction, which shows the importance of content in promoting product activity.

The quality of content and the establishment of content tone are of paramount importance. Although even a product like Zhihu cannot escape the irreversible universal law of entropy increase in content quality, we can set a higher starting point from the beginning and use various means to slow down the increase in entropy.

Zhihu is a popular question-and-answer platform, which means it is large but not refined. It may provide answers or content in many niche areas, but its product design means it cannot cover everything. For example, it cannot become a content community in the medical field, a content community in the sports field, or a content community in the fashion brand field. This is precisely the opportunity for other products to build a content community in a niche vertical field.

In the future, with the development of artificial intelligence, there may be a lot of machine-generated content, which may be called AIGC. Currently, earthquake forecasts are automatically generated and distributed by machines according to a certain format. In the future, more flexible and higher-quality content may be produced.

Author: Bean paste bun

Source: Red Bean Paste Bun (Z_G_X_MartiaN)