Zhihu completes Series C financing. How should the story of the Q&A community be told?

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Today, media reported that the Q&A community Zhihu has completed its C round of financing, with a financing amount of tens of millions of dollars. In addition to introducing new investors, Zhihu's original shareholders Softbank SAIF and Sinovation Ventures have also invested. After this round of financing, Zhihu's valuation reached 300 to 400 million US dollars.

It is worth noting that some media disclosed that the lead investor this time is Tencent. Zhihu has not yet made an official response to this news. If the news is true, it means that this largest question-and-answer community in China has chosen Tencent when it comes to standing on the BAT camp.

In fact, it has almost been admitted that Zhihu will hold a grand press conference this Sunday (November 8), and the media invitation part of the press conference is assisted by Sogou PR. If you use your toes to think about it, you can probably guess the content of the press conference.

Whether it is financing or taking sides, I am concerned about two questions. One is why is it Zhihu, and the other is how should the story of the Q&A community be told?

Why Zhihu?

In fact, the reason why Zhihu was chosen has been clearly explained in the article "Will Zhihu be the next company to be invested by BAT?"

The logic of the giants is to follow the demand. High-frequency demands such as travel, tourism, and food and drink have been incorporated one by one. There are not many high-frequency demands left, one of which is content. At present, content products on mobile terminals can be divided into two categories: channels and producers. The giants are strong in channels, but lack content. The entire mobile Internet is also lacking in content. WeChat is both a channel and a content producer. Other channels such as Toutiao and Baidu Baike are also working hard to encourage content production, but there is still a huge content producer: Zhihu.

In March this year, Zhihu community already had 17 million users, and the number of users has increased 40 times since it was launched in 2013. At this rate, Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan predicts that Zhihu will have 50 million users by the end of this year. The uniqueness of Zhihu cannot be seen from the number of users alone, but in comparison, the influence created by tens of millions of users on the Chinese Internet.

Judging from the Baidu Index, Zhihu's influence has been rising over the past year, and now it has surpassed Internet products such as Douban, Baidu Tieba, and Momo, which have hundreds of millions of users.

Small size, big power, this is the innovation behind Zhihu, which uses questions and answers to create a new form of content production. Different from the traditional content production method, Zhihu lowers the threshold for content production, allowing everyone with knowledge and ideas to become a content producer, and this production is not scattered, but has become a system. Even those channels that try to create content on mobile terminals still use the traditional content production method - content is produced by a specific group (such as "self-media"), rather than the general users. Zhihu's growth and expansion are based on this.

Let's extend this question. Assuming the rumors are true, what will Zhihu do after joining Tencent? From the information we know so far, there should be a deeper cooperation with Sogou Search. After Tencent acquired Sogou, it began to strengthen its search capabilities, such as handing over WeChat search to Sogou. After Tencent's stake in Zhihu, it is very likely that it will further release the high-quality content of Zhihu and help Zhihu to dig deeper into the content on the site. This is also in line with Zhihu's demands.

Another advantage of Tencent is that it has a strong social relationship chain. The addition of Zhihu will strengthen its advantage in this area. For example, Zhihu may be connected with WeChat, QQ and even QQ Space, while integrating the content and using social networks to better spread the content. Obviously, for Zhihu, connecting with WeChat is much more attractive than connecting with a Baidu account.

How to tell the story of the Q&A community

In a previous article by Huxiu titled "Users are algorithms, Zhihu stands opposite to Toutiao this time", the "new wine" of Zhihu Daily 3.0 was introduced: Dudu Daily, a content distribution product where everyone is the editor-in-chief. Everyone can build a small media brand based on their own interests and tastes, and readers can subscribe. The difference from products like Toutiao is that Dudu Daily relies on human judgment rather than machine algorithms.

As of July 2015, Zhihu has 29 million registered users, 110 million monthly unique users, and 300 million monthly cumulative page views. Zhihu has generated about 6.2 million questions and nearly 20 million answers. The total number of user answers is 4,129,244,445 words, which is nearly 100 times that of the Encyclopedia Britannica and 2,580 times that of The Deer and the Cauldron.

In fact, Zhihu has accumulated a large amount of high-quality content on the platform since its establishment 4 years ago. It is far from enough to distribute and circulate these contents only within the community. It needs more outlets to digest and disseminate them. Whether it is Zhihu Daily, Zhihu Selections, or Zhihu's paper books, they are all doing the same thing, which is the dissemination of high-quality content.

In addition, Zhihu's commercialization process is also starting. From March 29 to April 15, Zhihu Daily launched three sponsored articles marked as "Here is an advertisement". This is the first native advertisement on Zhihu Daily. The advertiser is Intel. This advertisement, which was circulated for two weeks, eventually generated 25 million exposures, 1 million readings, and about 140,000 interactions. From the data, it seems pretty good.

***Let’s take a look at the ideas and plans that Zhihu CEO Zhou Yuan mentioned in a previous interview with Curiosity Daily, about Zhihu and about commercialization.

Q: The outside world keeps examining Zhihu from the perspective of profitability, and people on Zhihu keep asking “How does Zhihu make money?” Have you thought much about this question?

Zhou Yuan: I didn’t think much about it before, but I started to think about it gradually last year. I didn’t take it too seriously before, and the most important thing at that time was to create user value.

In my opinion, this is a weak point of startups. Most of the startups I have come into contact with, including myself, still lack common sense. You have to respect business. Many people do not respect business. They may think a lot about the product, but you cannot be completely ignorant of business and expect that a pie will fall from the sky one day and everything will be done naturally. This is impossible.

Business logic has been around for thousands of years and needs to be respected. I think we still need to think deeply and think more. We don’t need to hide our intentions when it comes to native advertising, we just need to do it seriously.

We did some experiments last year, and we can see some changes from them. In addition, if we can't do advertising, then there's no need to think about other things. There will be huge differences in advertising on different media. So there will definitely be native ads on Zhihu. Now many banner ads and magazine ads are no different in form, but the media has changed a lot. This is a very failed thing.

Q: Do you expect Zhihu to be more than a knowledge community in the future? Or to put it more directly, is Zhihu going to become a social network or infrastructure like Facebook? What do you expect Zhihu to be like after it reaches 50 million users?

Zhou Yuan: Numbers are not important. In 2013, when Zhihu had just one million users, a user wrote an article called the 5 Million Rule of Community - if Zhihu reaches 5 million users, there will be a huge qualitative change. Later, I paid attention to what happened on Zhihu before and after the 5 million users, and there was nothing special about it.

I believe the starting point is the most important.

At last year's annual meeting, I asked all my colleagues, what is the one thing that has remained consistent and never changed at Apple in the past 39 years since its founding in 1976?

My answer is: they have been constantly improving and breaking through the experience and methods of human-computer interaction.

These breakthroughs in human-computer interaction and significant upgrades in experience have enabled the company's products, Macintosh, iPod and iPhone, to have a profound impact on the personal computer, consumer electronics, mobile phone, mobile Internet and music industries, some of which even dominate the development of entire industries.

For Zhihu, we must understand what growth means. Zhihu's mission is to make a truly important impact on improving the way people communicate with each other, and the way people understand each other and build trust.

I hope that with this starting point, on this road, we can reach for the stars and go further.