Zhihu product analysis report!

As China's largest comprehensive content community, Zhihu has people asking and answering a variety of questions every day. In terms of commercial monetization, Zhihu has tried multiple fields including knowledge payment, online education, and e-commerce.

1. Product Overview

1.1 Experience Environment

Experience time: 2022.4.16

App version: 8.14.0

Operating system: Android

Model: Mi 11

1.2 Product Background

Background: In the information age, people have diversified ways to acquire knowledge, but information is flooding. The Internet is filled with all kinds of useless information that lacks value, resulting in the valuable information being submerged. In this situation, people need a higher-quality platform to meet their needs for high-quality, high-value and more professional content.

1.3 Product Overview

Zhihu was founded in 2010 and has gradually become China's largest comprehensive content community. From 2010 to 2012, Zhihu was an invitation-only, closed online content community that focused on question-and-answer sessions. Zhihu added the image function in 2012, opened registration to the public in 2013, and has since grown into one of the largest comprehensive online content communities in China.

In terms of commercialization attempts, Zhihu began to provide online advertising in 2016, launched paid content in 2018, launched the Yanxuan membership program in the first half of 2019, and officially launched content commercialization solutions in early 2020. Since 2020, Zhihu has been expanding its content-centric commercialization approach, including providing online education and e-commerce related services.

1.4 Slogan

Here is a list of the promotional words used by Zhihu in chronological order.

Discover a bigger world

Keywords: discovery, big

The brand slogan first used by Zhihu. It can be seen that the role that Zhihu wants to play is to serve as a window for users to obtain fresh and valuable knowledge. Its focus is to attract a group of users who are highly educated, have unique insights and rich experience in the industry, especially young college students and white-collar workers who are enterprising and need to acquire new knowledge or broaden their horizons. These two keywords can fully demonstrate Zhihu’s positioning as a disseminator of elite culture.

Share your knowledge, experience and insights with the world

Keywords: share

Different individuals, different lives, and different experiences bring different experiences, cognitions, and values. Perhaps a person is not an expert in every industry, but there are always some areas that he is familiar with and can share. At this time, Knowledge hopes to serve as a forum, providing users with a platform for mutual communication and encouraging users to share their experiences.

If you have any questions, go to Zhihu

Keywords: Problem

Whether in life, study or work, everyone has doubts. When people around them cannot answer people's questions and search engines can hardly meet people's needs, people need a platform to solve their own problems in a targeted manner and browse other people's views and ideas to help themselves solve problems. The change in the slogan reflects Zhihu's shift in user communication strategy, transforming into a large-scale multi-person online question-and-answer platform that provides services to the majority of users.

Where there are questions, there are answers.

Keywords: question, answer

Add answers to your promotional copy, emphasizing solving problems for users. By using slogans to force users to buy products, the platform’s image is deepened in the users’ minds to cultivate user habits. It can be seen that at this stage Zhihu began to focus on the platform's most essential question-and-answer business.

Summarize:

Behind the change in the slogan lies Zhihu's transformation of its brand image and product strategy. From a small-scale elite cultural community at the beginning, to a forum that encourages users to be original and share knowledge, and finally to a comprehensive question-and-answer community for the general public; from vertical user segmentation to general popularization, Zhihu's user population is also constantly changing, with the number of users increasing, user types becoming more complex, and user quality declining.

2. Product Analysis

2.1 Strategic Level

2.1.1 Product Positioning

Mission: To enable people to better share knowledge, experience and insights and find their own answers” ​​is the brand mission.

As a comprehensive content platform, it provides question-and-answer, knowledge payment, news information, and interactive social services to the general public through graphics, text, audio, and video. Solve the general public's needs for hot Internet information, high-value knowledge and experience.

Content positioning: high-quality, high-standard, original, professional and rational knowledge community.

Content form positioning: text, image, video question and answer community

From a commercial perspective, Zhihu's transformation from an elite to a popular one is inevitable. For Zhihu, it can create better economic benefits and greater commercial value. For society, it can meet the needs of ordinary users for quality knowledge and provide users with a relatively good communication platform.

2.1.2 User Profile

Source: iResearch

From the above table, we can see that the average monthly number of active users of Zhihu is around 70 million, and the monthly number of active users fluctuates around. The statistical data is from 2021 to 2022. The data has a time length, so it is predicted that the number of Zhihu user groups will not increase significantly in the short term. Zhihu’s main focus in the future may be on the operation and value mining of user value.

Source: iResearch

Source: Baidu Index

From the above data statistics on Zhihu user attributes, we know that young people between the ages of 20 and 30 occupy half of Zhihu, among which the number of male users is significantly higher than that of female users. From this we can conclude the characteristics of Zhihu users: young generation, mostly male. Such user labels are also in line with Zhihu's self-positioning as a rational, objective and fair content knowledge platform.

Source: Baidu Index

As can be seen from the above figure, Zhihu users are widely distributed in various industries and their interests are also widely distributed. Compared with ordinary netizens, they prefer education and training, book reading, home appliances and digital products. Compared with all users on the Internet, their interest in various fields is also stronger. It can be seen that Zhihu users have a strong desire to explore the world, explore unknown life, and learn new knowledge.

Source: iResearch

Source: Baidu Index

Source: Zhihu 2021Q4 Financial Report

Through the analysis of the regions of Zhihu users, it can be seen that most of Zhihu's active users come from coastal cities and first- and second-tier cities. reason:

1. First- and second-tier cities have a large number of young people aged 15 to 30, who are more receptive to new things on the Internet, willing to explore new things, and obtain fresh information from the Internet.
2. Cities with higher economic development have a large number of Internet users, news media, and college students. Driven by career needs or interests, these people have a greater demand for fresh, high-quality knowledge.

Data source: Baidu Index

From the data, we know that the search index of the keyword Zhihu in the past six months has an average daily value of 150,000 on the PC side, which is about 5 times that of the mobile side. The author briefly analyzes some possible reasons for this phenomenon.

1. The mobile terminal has developed a Zhihu APP, which does not require PC users to access the website through a web page.
2. Ordinary users mostly use APP for fragmented reading and browsing of information to meet their daily needs, while PC web users are mostly creators who need to publish articles or manage background data.

Source: iResearch

According to the data in the table, the proportion of people with bachelor's degree or above on Zhihu reached. For Zhihu, a UGC platform, well-educated users can generate more high-value content among users, further attracting more and more people to join Zhihu. Moreover, most of the undergraduate students at this time are Generation Z born around 2000. They have rich material life, high consumption power and high willingness to consume, which creates a good soil environment for commercial monetization methods such as knowledge payment.

However, as a group of people who pursue high-quality knowledge acquisition and social interaction, once the quality of platform content declines, the negative impact on Zhihu as a content platform may be devastating.

Several key words of user characteristics can be extracted from the above picture: knowledge, quality, experience, and diversity.

When it comes to work and study, Zhihu users focus on self-improvement and use their free time to recharge and improve their competitiveness.

When it comes to life, Zhihu users focus on experience and pay attention to their own quality of life.

In terms of ideology, Zhihu users are young, have a high degree of acceptance of new things, and are willing to experience new things.

2.1.3 User needs + (user behavior)

After analyzing the characteristics of Zhihu's user groups based on the data, the author summarized some common user needs and attached the possible behaviors of users when using Zhihu in brackets.

1. Get more professional answers, high-quality opinions and views (ask questions, browse answers, and follow relevant professional questions and circles)

2. Get news information, hot topics, and kill time (browse hot lists, browse pushed articles)

3. Discover new knowledge, broaden your horizons, and learn in a fragmented way (browse Yanxuan columns, articles, e-books, and videos)

4. Exchange, discuss, and make friends (circle communication, follow circles or other users, and chat with like-minded people)

5. Share knowledge, insights, experiences, and experiences to gain psychological identification and satisfaction. (Create, read replies, browse related questions and answers)

The main needs of general users when using Zhihu: obtaining knowledge, news information, social communication, and gaining recognition

2.1.4 User Usage Scenarios

Type 1: Female, 20 years old, student, majoring in mathematics. By sharing my professional knowledge on the Internet, I met a group of like-minded friends and gained attention and likes.

Type 2: Male, 21 years old, a junior student majoring in computer science, hopes to work in a large company after graduation and wants to keep abreast of the latest developments in the industry. Therefore, he follows many industry experts on Zhihu and often reads their answers and columns to learn and supplement his knowledge at any time.

Type 3: Female, 26 years old, working, has a long commute to and from get off work, which is quite boring, so she opens Zhihu to learn about hot events and what people think, and also browses entertainment topics and witty answers to kill time.

Type 4: Male, 35 years old, a top professional. He used weekends and holidays to write answers on Zhihu. Through his accumulated knowledge and experience in his professional field, he accurately and effectively solved other people's problems, gained a lot of user attention and obtained certain financial rewards. The spiritual and material rewards further motivated his creation.

2.2 Market Analysis

Source: iResearch

The data shows that the Internet penetration rate in China is approximately over 50%, and the overall growth of Internet users has slowed down. In an environment where it is difficult to increase the number of users, the competition for user traffic among various Internet companies will intensify, and the focus will shift from driving growth in the number of users to in-depth exploration of user value.

Source: iResearch

China's online advertising market is still saturated. In the future, with the increase in Internet devices, the increase in the number of users and the time spent on the Internet, and the reform of advertising formats, Internet advertising will still have a large room for growth.

Data source: iResearch

The chart shows the changes in the structure of China's consumer spending from 2013 to 2017, among which spending on transportation and communications, education, chemical entertainment, and medical insurance has increased significantly. It can be seen that as the living standards of the country's residents improve, their consumption concepts and behaviors are also gradually changing. Among them, communications, education, and entertainment may bring about another transformation and upgrading of online consumption.

Source: Tencent Penguin Think Tank

As can be seen from the above figure, about 70% of Chinese netizens still lack the ability to obtain information, and most users have a strong demand to pay for obtaining targeted professional knowledge. From the perspective of user willingness to pay, knowledge payment is still a blue ocean market to be opened up.

Summarize:

Although the number of Internet users in China is growing slowly and most users' traffic is occupied by a small number of Internet applications, as the advertising market is still not saturated and payment for knowledge is becoming more and more accepted, Zhihu will surely have a place in the future Internet by relying on its own good knowledge platform environment to expand its user base and business scope.

3. Product Function Structure Diagram

Zhihu's homepage has five primary functional areas. In addition, the author extracts content sections from each functional area to facilitate comparison of different content formats on Zhihu.

The "Home" function area is divided into live broadcast, recommendation and hot list tabs. Zhihu puts the video page on the left side of the opening page, which is enough to reflect Zhihu's emphasis on the video content field, including but not limited to short videos, real-time streaming live broadcasts and video answers. From early text images to audio lectures, videos and live broadcasts, Zhihu's community content formats have continued to expand and deepen.

The "Dynamics" label allows users to obtain timely updates on the users they follow. Improving user experience means improving user loyalty and stickiness. Zhihu has evolved from its early BBS format to a forum format and then to the current question-and-answer platform. It can be seen that Zhihu has focused on user social interaction. It not only aims to create a knowledge content community, but also to provide good user social functions.

The "My" page aggregates most of Zhihu's sub-functions, including personal information, creations, membership areas, software settings, etc. It integrates some of the user's less frequently used functions and entrances into this interface, making other main functional areas appear simple to the greatest extent while not interfering with each other, thus preventing users from getting lost in the complex functional interface.

4. Product business flow chart

4.1 Zhihu login flow chart

4.2 Zhihu Question Flowchart

5. Zhihu page image

5.1 Home

5.2 User Home Page

5.3 Answer Page

6. Competitive product analysis

Since there are currently no products similar to Zhihu on the market, this article analyzes Zhihu's competitors from the perspective of application functions and service similarities.

6.1 Question and Answer Community Function

Zhihu is a question-and-answer community platform. Its main question-and-answer services are similar to products such as Baidu Knows, Wukong Q&A, and Quora from abroad.

From the perspective of user needs and relationships, Baidu Knows is bounty-driven. Users ask questions in the hope of getting answers, and writers answer in the hope of getting paid. The relationship between the two lies in the answer. The answers on Zhihu are driven by social identity. Users are both questioners and answerers. While interacting, they not only hope to gain knowledge, but also want to make friends with like-minded people and join circles of interest. It can be said that answering is just the beginning of social interaction.

In terms of content orientation and quality depth, Baidu Knows is aimed at the general public, focuses on breadth and width, and tends to focus on general skills, life experience and other fields. Zhihu takes a professional approach, and its target users are well-educated people. It shares personal experiences in their industry, unique insights into society, etc., ultimately achieving refinement and depth of knowledge.

6.2 Knowledge payment service

In the paid knowledge field of Zhihu, domestic applications with similar services include Duoduo and Himalaya.

In terms of content format, the paid services include audiobooks + e-books + lectures. Zhihu offers Q&A + e-books + Zhihu Live, while Himalaya focuses on audiobooks + lectures. In comparison, Duoduo and Himalaya are more inclined to the field of audio payment. Although Zhihu has dabbled in voice Q&A and consulting, as a question-and-answer community, its main focus is still on knowledge payment in the form of pictures and texts. In terms of the similarity of their functional services, there are many overlapping areas, and the competition in the knowledge field may become more intense in the future.

7. Business Model

Zhihu adopts a content-centered profit approach. It mainly includes online advertising, paid membership, content business solutions, online education and e-commerce.

1. Paid Membership

Zhihu provides paid knowledge content such as live and recorded lectures, e-books, academic papers, magazines, selected columns, as well as customized membership privilege services in the app such as widgets, logos, and name changes.

2. Advertising

It mainly includes startup screen ads, feed ads, and ads inserted at the end of answers.

3. Commercialization solutions

Relying on the high-quality content of Zhihu's existing community, we provide Zhihu platform resources to merchants, assist them in content production, and provide precise content distribution, user acquisition promotion and user exposure services.

4. Education

In 2020, Zhihu launched online education services focusing on exam preparation and career training.

5. E-commerce commission business

That is, merchants, individual creators, etc. direct traffic to the Zhihu platform through grass-planting, live streaming, and good product recommendations, and Zhihu is responsible for exposing the articles to users. After users usually browse, consume, etc. on third-party platforms, Zhihu and content creators jointly share the commission fees paid by the third-party platform.

Data source: Zhihu performance announcement

Data source: Zhihu 2021Q4 financial report

It can be seen from Zhihu’s financial report in 2021 that advertising, paid memberships and the three brothers of Zhi+ are Zhihu’s main sources of income. Compared with the situation a few years ago when advertising accounted for the majority of profits, Zhihu’s profit-making methods are more diverse and healthier.

However, according to Zhihu's 2021Q4 financial report data released to the public, it can be seen that the revenue was 1 billion yuan, but the loss was close to 400 million yuan. While Zhihu's revenue is increasing, its losses are also increasing. The author believes that the reasons may be as follows:

• Users are used to free high-quality answers and a pure community environment, and are quite resistant to Zhihu's behavior of introducing soft articles and advertisements for commercialization at the expense of user experience.
• The content provided by members lacks appeal to users. The greatest value of the Q&A community comes from the valuable experiences shared by others. Yanxuan membership is a paid service. However, according to Zhihu’s own official statistics in January 2021, most of the content in the Yanxuan column is story-based and lacks the professionalism required for Zhihu content.
• Ordinary users have shallow demands for content and lack the motivation to pay. According to data released by China Securities, Zhihu's user payment rate is only 0.059.

Summary: If Zhihu wants to realize commercialization, how to balance user experience, community atmosphere and content quality is a question that Zhihu must answer.

8. Conclusion

The following are the author’s personal feelings when using Zhihu based on personal preference information, for reference only.

• Zhihu’s ability to produce valuable answers is weakening. In daily use of Zhihu, we can observe that the answers with high likes and questions with high attention are mostly old answers from a few years ago. The proportion of long and substantial answers is decreasing, while the number of answers that simply express emotions and opinions without objective factual analysis is increasing. It can be seen that the number of users willing to spend their time producing high-quality content is decreasing, while the number of the new generation of young people is increasing.
• The existing valuable content of Zhihu is being continuously diluted. With the influx of a large number of users, Zhihu's broken window effect is becoming more and more obvious. The users' casual and everyday questions and answers are creating a large amount of "junk" information. From the push of questions in the Creation Square, it can be seen that the content and direction of users' questions are gradually moving towards entertainment and life. Zhihu can meet the same user needs, and search engines and other social platforms can also meet them.
• The community’s ecological environment is declining. With the emergence of commercial soft articles, advertising promotions, grass-planting videos and Yanxuan's "Story Collection", users began to ridicule and question Zhihu's Shuihu, Bhu, and Chuihu. In recent years, under the pressure of profitability, Zhihu has been chasing hot topics such as short videos, live broadcasts, and soft-text sales, and the atmosphere of product commercialization has become increasingly intense.
• As information explodes, Pareto's law begins to take hold. A large number of questions and answers flooding into the user's field of vision will interfere with the user's acceptance and processing of normal information. Faced with the surge in information, users often only look at "high-quality" questions and "highly praised" answers, resulting in a vicious cycle in which users cannot see or are unwilling to see new answers, and creators are unwilling to invest their energy in creation, which greatly affects Zhihu's ecological cycle.

Zhihu has three wheels as a content community: users, content, and interaction.

• New users: inject fresh blood into the community, bring more diverse culture to the platform, and create more high-quality content
• High-quality content: Bring value to users and attract more users to join
• High-quality interaction: Encourage users to produce more content, increase user stickiness, loyalty and identity

As a PUGC platform, users and content are the foundation of Zhihu, and interaction is the bridge between the two. If the three are balanced and coordinated, they can continuously promote the formation of a positive cycle. On the contrary, the loss of any wheel would have a serious impact on the carriage.

The author personally believes that the difficulty of Zhihu lies in the difficulty of combining entertainment with professionalism.

Zhihu implemented an invitation-only system in its early days, which not only accumulated a large amount of valuable Internet information for the platform, but also created enough momentum for the platform in its early days. Zhihu has risen steadily thanks to its large number of high-quality users and the excellent content they create. However, success and failure are all due to Xiao He!

For users, it is true that they chat and laugh with great scholars and interact with all kinds of people, but for the platform, even a penny can make a hero fall. High-quality user groups bring high-quality content, but this group has a high level of knowledge and a broader vision, so how to monetize it becomes a big problem.

In recent years, Zhihu's pan-entertainment has brought a large number of new users to the platform, but the entertainment atmosphere will break the professional image that Zhihu has created in the minds of users, thereby causing the loss of some people who are eager to improve themselves and learn new knowledge.

Perhaps Zhihu can consider taking into account the needs of both the general public and the elite groups, and based on the Zhihu account salt value index, separate functional areas for some high-quality content and users. Users can join this area by creating content and gaining recognition from others. This may better present professional content and knowledge to users in need, allowing users with different needs to get what they need and achieve a win-win situation.

During the writing process of this article, I referred to many articles and opinions of predecessors. If there are any infringements on the rights of others, discrepancies between data and facts, logical errors, etc., I hope you can point them out. Thank you.