An article reveals the social gene secrets behind Zhihu's $1 billion valuation

Even a community like Zhihu, which is full of high-quality users, is still full of "insignificant transparent people". They only pay attention to a very few people, they only look at a few questions, they don't ask questions, they don't answer, they don't even make any sound; even if they do, only a few people can hear it.

After the latest round of D financing , Zhihu has become a unicorn with a valuation of US$1 billion. What kind of unique genes does this Chinese Internet community, which is famous for its high-quality users, have?

We recently spent some time conducting a sample data analysis and research on Zhihu's core users.

Experimental design

First of all, we do not want to build a huge crawler system and database to analyze Zhihu users across the entire network. This will inevitably involve a lot of work in cleaning and eliminating zombie users, which will be very time-consuming.

Is there any simple and effective sampling method?

Of course there are: favorites followers.

We know that favorites are an important way for Zhihu to distribute knowledge through users; many important favorites are not created by big Vs, which allows knowledge to be more effectively transmitted through non-important nodes; at the same time, paying attention to favorites is a completely proactive behavior of users. These two points naturally ensure that our research samples can basically be regarded as non-zombie core users with active intentions.

We selected six collections of different types from Zhihu collections with more than 10,000 followers, with a total of about 200,000 followers: We sorted out their personal information (following, followed by, questions asked, answers, school, region, etc.) that was publicly available on their homepages. Based on these data, we can conduct some small analysis on Zhihu users who are oriented towards these content categories.

By the way, the six collections and their corresponding content types are as follows:

• "Buy these when you really want to spend money" - Buy, buy, buy
• "Financial Baozi Shop" - FaFaFa
• "Laughing till vomiting blood"——Hahaha
• "Thinking, thinking about the bigger world" - learn, learn, learn
• "Good resources" - please
• "XXOO Those Things"——Papapapa

Let’s take a look at the characteristics of these Zhihu core users.

Analyze the results

1. Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are the bases of Zhihu’s core users

21.8% of Zhihu users filled in the "Place of Residence" column. After removing magical places such as "Azeroth" and "Turn Right" and summarizing them at provincial administrative units, we obtained the geographical distribution of Zhihu users across the country; since the population base of each province and city varies greatly, we divided the number of core user samples by the number of permanent residents at the end of 2015, and we can get the user density of Zhihu in each province across the country. The result is shown in the figure below:

It can be seen that Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai occupy the top three places in terms of both the number of Zhihu friends and the density of Zhihu friends. The rankings of the number of Zhihu friends and Zhihu friend density in most regions fluctuated by more than 3 digits, especially in Tianjin, Henan, Shandong and other regions where the differences were the largest (Note: the huge changes in the rankings of Macau, Qinghai and other places may be affected by the small sample size).

2. Technology, information, and finance are the three main industries of Zhihu’s core users

23.3% of Zhihu users filled in the "Industry" column. We matched Zhihu's 14 major industry categories with the industry classification of the third national economic census (with some mergers and deletions) to calculate the Zhihu user density in each industry. The result is shown in the figure below:

It can be seen that in terms of density, "High-tech + Information Media" ranks first in the number of friends with an absolute advantage, followed by "Finance".

Zhihu's penetration in the technology, media, and financial industries far exceeds that in other industries.

Interestingly, “Manufacturing and Processing”, which ranks third in terms of the number of Zhihu users, ranks only ninth in terms of density; while “Arts and Entertainment”, which ranks ninth in terms of the number of Zhihu users, ranks third in terms of density. There is a similar ranking reversal phenomenon between the service industry and medical services, and between public services and education.

3. Although Zhihu has a strong penetration in the technology industry, do you think it is still dominated by programmers ?

After understanding the penetration of Zhihu in various industries, we can further count the attention and attention of Zhihu core users in each industry (taking the average value after removing the top 5% of big Vs in each industry), as shown in the figure below:

From the perspective of the number of fans (number of followers), Zhihu users in the arts and entertainment category ranked first, far higher than the high-tech industry which ranked second.

It is also worth noting that Zhihu users follow the positive correlation between the number of followers and the number of followers. The high-tech industry ranks first in this relationship, but the art and entertainment industry completely ignores this rule. The number of followers ranks only in the middle, but the number of fans far exceeds that of other industries.

4. If you don’t fill in 985 as your education background, you will feel embarrassed to greet people on Zhihu

12.5% ​​of Zhihu users filled in the "Graduation School" column. Since the universities attended by Zhihu users are widely distributed (from Harvard and Oxford to Bluefield and even stay-at-home moms), and some of the names are not standardized (such as Wudaokou Men's Sports School, Wujiaochang University of Arts and Sciences, etc.), we only selected several universities with standardized names and a large number of Zhihu users for statistics. Similarly, since the sizes of different schools vary greatly, we use the number of students enrolled in each university nationwide as a proxy for the number of alumni and calculate the density of Zhihu's core users in different universities. The result is shown in the figure below:

It can be seen that among the top 20 universities with the largest number of Zhihu users, all are “985” universities, with Zhejiang University ranking first, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Wuhan University ranking second and third respectively. In terms of the density of Zhihu friends, universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University, Tongji University, Renmin University and Nanjing University are ranked in order.

As expected, if you are on Zhihu and you are not from a 985 university or something, you will feel embarrassed to say hello to others.

But the direct result of this pretentious effect is that it is very likely that those students who are not from 985 universities do not even fill in their alma mater (the filling rate in the sample is only 12.5%).

5. In terms of the level of attention, alumni of Renmin University topped the list, while alumni of Peking University completely crushed Tsinghua University.

With the average number of followers of each university as the x-axis and the average number of fans as the y-axis, we can draw the following graph (after removing the extreme values ​​of the top 5% of each university, we take the average value):

Based on this, universities can be divided into four groups:

• More attention, more fans: Renmin University of China, Peking University, Sichuan University, Fudan University
• Less attention, more fans: University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
• More followers, fewer fans: Chongqing University, Zhejiang University, Hunan University, etc.
• Less followers, fewer fans: Shenzhen University, Xidian University, Tongji University, etc.

6. Which university has the most in-depth research spirit on the subject of "sexual intercourse" on Zhihu?

In order to more comprehensively depict the interest distribution of Zhihu users from various universities, we cross-referenced the universities they graduated from and the types of favorites they followed, and we can get the classification and interest distribution as shown in the following figure:

The favorites followers can be sorted by the universities they belong to as follows:

• Top 3 shopping destinations: Sichuan University, Southeast University, Jilin University
• Top 3: Renmin University of China, Nankai University, Xiamen University
• Hahaha top 3: Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology
• Top 3 for studying: Shandong University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zhejiang University
• Please, please ...
• Top 3 universities for sex: Southeast University, Xiamen University, Shanghai Jiaotong University

Please see the following figure for a summary of points of interest by university:

You Zhihu users who graduated from 985 universities, please claim it for yourselves.

7. This is still a Zhihu full of "insignificant transparent people".

All the above conclusions are based on the calculation of this group of favorites user samples. So let’s take a look at their activity level.

We counted five indicators, including the number of followers, the number of fans, the number of questions followed, the number of questions asked, and the number of answers. The results are as follows:

In the above figure, p10/p25/p50/p75/p90 represent the quantiles of each indicator respectively. The meaning of quantiles can be understood as follows:

• When the number of fans reached 67, it had exceeded 90% of Zhihu's core users;
• When your number of fans reaches 16, you exceed 75% of Zhihu's core users;
• When your number of fans reaches 5, you exceed 50% of Zhihu's core users.

No matter how we are active in this community, asking questions, answering questions, arguing, forming groups, and fighting with each other. We should always be aware that:

Even a community like Zhihu, which is full of high-quality users, is still full of "little transparent people". They only pay attention to a very few people, they only look at a few questions, they don't ask questions, they don't answer, they don't even make any sound; even if they do, only a few people can hear it.

All of this is exactly the same as the real world we live in.

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The author of this article is @兔兔 and it is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!