Analyze the differences between Zhihu and Jianshu from five dimensions of communication and channels!

Zhihu and Jianshu seem to be completely different. The most obvious difference is that Zhihu is full of elites, while Jianshu is more like a grassroots writing platform. They seem a bit similar: for example, in many product details, Jianshu has traces of imitating Zhihu; for example, the monetization models of Zhihu authors and Jianshu authors are exactly the same: publishing books and teaching courses.

Lin Li, the founder of Jianshu, said that Jianshu and Zhihu are comrades-in-arms and have a common enemy - WeChat .

So, what are the differences between Zhihu and Jianshu?

1. Disseminator

In theory, everyone can become a communicator on self-media platforms (just register an account) and have the same dissemination conditions. But in fact, huge differences in registration time, operational capabilities and other aspects have led to the gradual differentiation of the communication power among communicators, forming strong communicators and weak communicators. Strong communicators are formed based on platform characteristics and in turn influence platform characteristics and development.

Each platform has two types of strong communicators. One type is selected by platform users, and is reflected in data such as the number of fans, likes, and comments that indicate active participation. The other type is guided and cultivated by the platform, and is reflected in platform certification and recommendations.

In most cases, these two types will transform into each other and form a unified one. For example, the platform will give many honors to big Vs with a large number of fans on the platform, and through official recommendations and certifications, it will provide more opportunities for high-quality authors to increase their fans (Sister Chen’s account with the same name on Jianshu gained 1,500+ fans in a short period of time because of official recommendations).

1. User selection

Zhihu official website does not display popular authors. Yanshuo.com uses crawler technology to update relevant data in real time. The top 10 authors ranked by the number of likes are:

The top 20 authors in terms of the number of fans on Jianshu obtained through crawling are:

Most of the popular authors on Zhihu and Jianshu come from the community’s popular topics, which will be analyzed later and will not be expanded here.

2. Platform-guided

1) Platform certification

Zhihu's user identification is divided into two parts: " Excellent Answerer" and "Personal and Institutional Certification".

"Excellent Answerers" have contributed a large amount of professional content on Zhihu. Most of them are deeply engaged in their professional fields and continue to share their knowledge, experience and insights on Zhihu. Zhihu uses algorithms to identify these excellent answerers and puts orange logos next to their personal homepages and user names.

The calculation of "excellent answerer" mainly refers to the topic weight of the user in a specific field. The answers of high-weight users will have certain ranking advantages. Their votes will have a greater impact on the ranking of answers. There is only one way to improve your weight in a certain field on Zhihu: write high-quality answers in this field.

Zhihu currently has open certification for the following areas of institutional certification:

• A formally qualified organization

The personal certification fields that are currently open for certification are:

• Public figures, including: well-known writers, directors, actors, singers, athletes, etc. (currently only accepting guests invited by operations);
• Research and teaching staff, including those from well-known domestic and foreign universities, with doctoral degrees or doctoral students;
• Middle and senior management personnel of well-known enterprises;
• Holders of professional qualification certificates in the financial field, including: Certified Public Accountants (CPA), etc.;
• Legal services industry, including practicing lawyers, law firm partners, and patent agents;
• the medical profession, including practicing physicians;
• Engineers, including: first-level registered architects, first-level registered constructors, etc.

Zhihu's identity authentication itself does not include any differentiated permissions or rights, but only represents the sincerity of communication and discussion.

Jianshu’s user identities mainly include : “Contracted Author” and “Quality Author”

Currently, Jianshu's contracted authors are divided into two directions: publishing and course. Those who wish to apply to be a contracted author must apply through both publishing (i.e. Jianshu copyright author) and course (i.e. Jianshu University lecturer). Applications from authors of pure high-quality content will no longer be accepted.

Different from contracted authors who are committed to development cooperation in the fields of copyright and courses, high-quality authors in the content field recognize the articles of Jianshu authors from the content dimensions of different fields. Currently it is mainly an invitation-based system, but you can also recommend yourself.

The fields currently open for certification include: science and technology, history, humanities, stories, film and television, travel, life, observation, serialized novels, comics, sports, two-dimensional, business management, games , children's stories, programmers , popular science, etc.

Unlike Zhihu, high-quality authors in the content field of Jianshu enjoy certain privileges. For example, they have the right to submit articles to special topics and homepages without review.

By comparison, we can find that Zhihu has gone further in the commercialization process, while Jianshu has a more mature idea of ​​monetizing high-quality users.

2) Platform recommendation

Zhihu has set up a recommendation section for active answerers on the homepage of a specific topic. The official has not announced the specific algorithm, but through observation it can be found that the overlap between active answerers and excellent answerers is very high.

Zhihu Topic Home Page

Jianshu has set up a column for recommended authors on its homepage:

Home Page

2. Content of Communication

1. Content format

The content format of Jianshu is relatively simple, mainly consisting of articles. Zhihu's content formats are relatively richer, mainly including questions and answers, articles and ideas.

"Ideas" is a new feature that Zhihu launched not long ago. It is mainly used to share fragmented thoughts and supports text, pictures, videos and external links.

At present, the most common content on Jianshu and Zhihu is graphic and text content, and both support videos. The slight difference is that Zhihu content is more professional and can insert code blocks:

And the formula:

2. Popular content

The latest "Zhihu User Profile and Media Value Research Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Zhihu User Report") released by Zhihu and iResearch shows that 70.6% of users are eager to learn knowledge and improve themselves through Zhihu, and 65.5% of users use Zhihu to ask questions and search for professional knowledge.

For example, questions such as "How to study efficiently for a long time", "Why are outstanding people outstanding", and "Which bad habits in life can bring immediate benefits once corrected" have long received a lot of attention on Zhihu.

In addition to professional knowledge, interesting popular science content is also likely to be popular on Zhihu.

For example, in response to the question "What is the most profitable patent in the world so far?", the user "You Like Me" replied, "In pharmaceutical companies, it is normal for a patent to support a listed company." He gave the example that the expiration of the Viagra patent triggered a collective climax and capital carnival among pharmaceutical companies around the world; another user mentioned that the copyright of the birthday celebration song "Happy Birthday to You" had generated considerable income for Warner every year. Because of the unique perspective and interesting content of the answer, this question attracted nearly 2 million users in a short period of time.

The top 10 most liked questions on Zhihu collected by Yanshuo.com also follow this pattern:

• What life lessons do you think it’s best to understand sooner rather than later?
• Which moment made you realize that wealth has limited your imagination?
• What behaviors or practices in WeChat Moments seem particularly low?
• What magical operations have you taken to turn the tide?
• How should a cultured person express his anger?
• What advice would you give to a 20-year-old?
• When did you feel you had hurt your child?
• Which moment made you realize that wealth has limited your imagination?
• How "dominant" can a top student be?
• Why is it so hard to meet an interesting soul?

The popular content on Jianshu can be seen from the hot topics. There are 15 topics on Jianshu that have attracted more than 1 million followers, namely, reading, traveling·on the road, short stories, youth, history, photography, food, poetry, talking about love·talking about love, Jianshu movies , social hot spots, lifestyle, hand-painted, philosophy, and @IT· Internet .

It can be seen that most of the hot topics are literary and artistic, such as reading, traveling, movies, photography, and poetry. This is very similar to Douban , and the overlap with Zhihu is very low. Most of the popular authors on Jianshu come from these topics. For example, Peng Xiaoliu, the "number one author on Jianshu", started writing articles on "reading".

3. Content Review

Zhihu prohibits four types of content and behavior: violations of laws and regulations, unfriendly behavior (contempt, slander, ridicule, provocation, etc.), spam advertising information, and malicious behavior (repeatedly posting the same answer to different questions, inducing voting or attention, etc.).

Zhihu discovers violations through two methods: proactive discovery and accepting user reports. Users can use the "Report" function on the Zhihu page to report suspected illegal behaviors and users.

Jianshu prohibits advertising, spam, plagiarism, or unauthorized reproduction of content. Users can also report violations by clicking the Report button at the bottom of the article.

At this stage, Jianshu and Zhihu can both safely divert traffic to other self-media platforms. Jianshu can even directly bind social accounts such as WeChat and Weibo in the background and display them on personal homepage.

Jianshu Personal Homepage

In comparison, Zhihu's attitude is a little ambiguous. It neither supports nor explicitly prohibits it. However, around September 2016, in order to purify the Zhihu environment, it automatically redirected links for QR code images.

3. Channel Media

1. Timeliness and persistence of communication

Jianshu has a very strong timeliness. New high-quality articles will be quickly recommended to the homepage, thus gaining a lot of exposure. Correspondingly, Jianshu's durability is relatively weak. After a user publishes an article, it will soon be covered by other articles. Because of the timeline sorting mode, this article is difficult to be turned out for other users to browse.

Zhihu weakens the timeliness of content and strengthens its durability. The ranking of Zhihu content has little to do with time, and high-quality answers with high user recognition will remain in the top position for a long time.

2. Audience Engagement

Zhihu users can participate in the interaction by agreeing, thanking, collecting, commenting, following, sending private messages, rewarding, sharing, opposing, and not helping. Relatively speaking, Jianshu is a community with more positive energy, where the interaction methods are mainly based on support and encouragement, and there is no negative feedback interaction such as "opposition, no help" etc.

4. Audience

1. Audience characteristics

The Zhihu User Report shows that Zhihu users show a trend of diversified distribution in terms of gender, age, region and other dimensions.

In terms of gender, male users account for 53.3% of Zhihu users, while female users account for 46.7%, and the ratio of men to women is approaching balance.

In terms of age, users aged 36-40 account for 14% of Zhihu, while the new generation under 24 and the backbone of society aged 25-35 account for 22% and 61% respectively. The latter two categories of users are the core groups of Zhihu.

Geographically, the distribution of Zhihu users is relatively balanced, with Zhihu users ranging from first-tier cities to fifth-tier cities, among which users in first-tier, new first-tier, and second-tier cities account for 41.4%. It can be said that the emerging middle class and influential people have become the mainstream of Zhihu users.

There is no public data about Jianshu's audience. However, Jianshu's founder Lin Li mentioned in an interview with ifanr.com at the end of 2015 that according to a sample survey of Jianshu's users, it was found that Jianshu's user base is highly young, with more than 60% of users being born in the 1990s, about 20% being born in the 2000s, and the rest being born in the 1980s. Among them, 75% have a college degree or above, and about 15% have a high school degree.

2. Audience’s behavioral motivations

The "Zhihu User Report" shows that the main purpose of users using Zhihu is to learn knowledge and improve themselves, pay attention to and discuss topics of interest, ask questions and search for knowledge in professional fields, share their own knowledge and experience, follow hot topics, meet experts, etc.

Image source: iResearch

Jianshu was initially an editor that only provided writing functions, and only gradually developed browsing functions. Therefore, Jianshu's audience and disseminators have always been highly overlapping, and writing is the most important motivation for Jianshu users to use Jianshu.

3. The value of the audience

The "Zhihu User Report" shows that the proportion of highly educated people on Zhihu has reached 80.1%, the proportion of people with a master's degree or above is higher than the overall level, and nearly 20% of users have studied abroad; in terms of monthly income distribution, high-income people and well-off people, accounting for 76%, are the main users of Zhihu, users with a monthly income of more than 10,000 yuan account for 30%, and users with a monthly family income of more than 20,000 yuan account for 41%; users with investable assets of more than 100,000 yuan account for 36%.

Zhihu users' high education, high income and high purchasing power make the entire audience group high-value. In terms of audience value, Jianshu cannot match it in the short term.

5. Communication Effect

1. Distribution Mechanism

Zhihu adopts a "decentralized" content operation method, which gives users a high degree of freedom and also encourages users to acquire social relationships faster. Zhihu’s homepage has undergone many revisions, but in general it is a “people-oriented” recommendation mechanism, and the vast majority of the content is related to people and topics that users follow.

After a user answers a question, the relevant answers will be distributed to the followers of the question. Editors' recommendations and popular content are displayed in the second column, with significantly lower exposure .

Jianshu adopts a "centralized" content operation approach. Users contribute to special topics or homepages through the "submission" mechanism. Jianshu's content operation team and relevant special topic editors select suitable manuscripts through manual screening and place them on the homepage.

In addition to manually screened and recommended articles on the homepage of Jianshu, popular content generated by user interactions also receives important display positions, such as new on the list, popular in the past 7 days, popular in the past 30 days, etc.

The content that Jianshu users are interested in is indirectly displayed in the second column, and the exposure is greatly reduced.

It can be seen that the distribution logic of Zhihu and Jianshu is completely different. If you want to get more exposure on Zhihu, the best way is to find hot topics and highly-watched questions to answer. On Jianshu, the most important thing is to cater to the editors of each topic and the homepage to get a chance to be on the homepage.

2. Sorting mechanism

According to Zhihu Product Director @黄涛, the sorting algorithm for the old version of Zhihu answers can be simplified to:

Score = Weighted approval – Weighted disapproval

The new algorithm has been improved on this basis, adding the variable "agree/disagree". The main purpose is to allow the newly added high-quality answers to have the opportunity to be ranked at the front. In summary, the main factors that affect the ranking of Zhihu answers can be summarized as follows:

• Agreeing with the answer will move it up in the ranking, while disagreeing with the answer will move it down.
• It is critical to get the approval of high-powered users
• Higher "Agree/Disagree" values ​​lead to more exposure

Note: The number of votes for approval, disapproval, and unhelpful votes for all answers posted by a user under a series of related topics determines the user's weight in that field. People who create professional, rigorous, and serious high-quality answers on Zhihu have greater judgment (i.e. weight) in the field they are good at.

It can be seen that user participation has a great impact on the ranking of Zhihu answers. The sorting of Jianshu is mainly based on the timeline, and is mainly manually screened and sorted by editors.

summary

In general, the differences between Zhihu and Jianshu are huge, but we cannot draw conclusions based on subjective judgment alone. Only by making detailed comparisons and summaries can we scientifically guide future cross-platform operations.

The author of this article is @草莓学堂 and it is compiled and published by (青瓜传媒). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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