Zhihu Product Analysis Report

"Where there is a question, there is an answer." Zhihu has entered its tenth year of development. As one of the few question-and-answer communities, how did Zhihu get to where it is today? The author of this article has conducted an in-depth analysis of Zhihu and hopes it will be helpful to you.

To summarize this report in two sentences: there are two things to do.

1. Increase retention: general content, active fans, and promote output.
2. Maintain the atmosphere: dual communities, speech assessment, and light serialization.

1. The essence of Zhihu’s model—What exactly is Zhihu?

Strangers will pass each other by, acquaintances will exchange a few words when they meet, and people with similar interests will chat endlessly when they meet. If the memories between acquaintances are taken away, they will become strangers. If you take away the interests between people with similar interests, they will become strangers.

What connects people is "content", which may be memories, interests, personalities, similar interests, etc. If people do not have some "content" to act as a medium to alleviate the differences between people, then there will be no resonance and no communication. Anything that can eliminate differences can be called content.

Three types of social interaction:

When it is one-on-one, both parties are content providers. When one party cannot provide content, the interaction cannot take place.

When a group is in pair, it is divided into speaker and listener. The speaker is the content provider and the others are content consumers. When the speaker stops talking, or the listener stops listening, the interaction stops.

If there is no need for a large number of people on the platform to interact in an organized manner, then it will naturally be divided into UGC and users. There are five properties around UGC and users:

UGC and users have a corresponding relationship:

UGC needs listeners, and users also need UGC. If UGC does not find corresponding users, UGC will leave. If users do not find UGC that suits their taste, they will also leave.

The degree of amplification of the content determines the upper limit of the platform:

If the platform cannot amplify the content, for example, if Douyu Live can no longer be broadcast online and users can only meet offline to watch the hosts play games, then the number of users will instantly shrink by 99.99%. If Zhihu's Q&A becomes a one-on-one private chat, then the number of users will also immediately shrink by 99.99%.

It can be seen that the degree of content amplification is determined by the participants and the retention time of the content. For example, when thoughts are recorded in writing, there is a double amplification of the time dimension and the number of participants; when speaking with a microphone but not recording, the number of participants is amplified but the time dimension is not amplified; when recording family videos and not showing them to outsiders, the time dimension is amplified but the participants are not amplified.

The degree of content matching determines the retention of the platform:

The degree of matching determines whether users can successfully find content. Users who fail to find content will become redundant users. If they cannot find their favorite content, they will not be able to retain it.

Pairing and amplification are interdependent. Amplification is only effective when they are paired. Only by magnifying it can we ensure that the content is matched.

Atmosphere determines the reproduction of content:

The atmosphere created by the interaction between content and users greatly affects the reproduction of content and users.

Atmosphere is the intuitive cognition of the product's boundaries. Atmosphere tells users the boundaries of the product. A good atmosphere includes "emotion". What is emotion? Communication is driven by intrinsic motivation. Within the scope of forming an intuition about the product, people can communicate in a friendly, free, serious and recognized manner.

The reason why Wukong Answers lost to Toutiao is not only because its algorithm was technically adapted to Lizard Brain content and its traffic was blocked by major manufacturers, but most importantly, it lost the atmosphere of intrinsic motivation. People do not communicate with each other for the purpose of interests and like-minded people, but for external money and commercial operations. In this atmosphere, writers cannot really write about what they are interested in, and there is a lack of users who are truly interested in his writing. The sense of belonging to the community is achieved through countless iterations of the community from small to large, which produces very subtle consensus and community symbols. People can intuitively understand what the community is and where its boundaries are. Because community culture is formed by consensus among users, it can only be created by a self-organizing system and cannot be changed at will by planning.

Communities are connected through people's intentions, habits, memories and intuitive cognition. Internet content communities, as virtual communities, require the same conditions to form.

The entry of new users will re-search for corresponding relationships, and the atmosphere will be reconstructed during the corresponding process:

This process cannot be too drastic. If it is too drastic, the competitive core of the question-and-answer product will be flattened and users will lose the reason to stay in the product. If it is too slow, it will lead to slow expansion and the speed of commercialization will be reduced. Therefore, it is necessary to control the influx rate of new users, control the degree to which new users reconstruct the atmosphere, protect the original community culture, and at the same time protect the core competitiveness of the product.

The simplified expansion cycle is as follows:

Attraction - shock - stability is the trilogy of community expansion.

The interactive relationship between old users forms culture, and the accumulation of culture will form the original community. The original community gains corresponding reputation to attract interested people. After new users enter, they will find corresponding relationships with UGC. In this process, the community culture will be reconstructed. Some old users who are familiar with the original community culture will also be lost in the process of reconstruction. Then the old and new users will gradually mix and stabilize, forming a new community atmosphere to attract new users.

So two questions to ask:

• Is the user pool increasing or decreasing?
• Does the current atmosphere maintain the core competitiveness of the community?
• Are business capabilities enhanced in community reconstruction?

These three points are the core issues of Zhihu. A good Zhihu needs to continuously increase its user pool while maintaining the core competitiveness of the Q&A community. It also needs to find business opportunities in it to support the development and operation of Zhihu.

2. Zhihu Analysis

What is a business like? How was it formed? I think there are mainly three conditions.

The core person will build the company according to his ideas, but it cannot exceed the objective conditions. The core person will choose the direction according to his own temperament among the various possibilities within the objective conditions. Business needs and regulatory needs are the most important.

• Business Judgment
• Core character
• Supervision, etc. (Not enough understanding, not discussed yet)

Next, we will discuss how business limitations constrain Zhihu and how the founders’ personalities and intentions shape Zhihu.

2.1 Zhihu from the data

Background introduction:

China's total population is 1.4 billion, and 920 million means that the incremental space on the mobile side has really reached its peak, the overall demographic dividend has basically disappeared, and the era of wild growth has come to an end. What businesses need to do next is to strengthen content, experience, business models, and compete in operational levels. Seeking to surpass competitors in terms of refinement is the main theme of the product. The giants are actively promoting the ecological development of products. In the future, market segmentation will become more and more vertical and more and more refined.

As people's material and cultural levels increase and their living standards improve, their willingness and demands for content consumption will gradually increase, forcing major companies to upgrade their content. Zhihu's innate genes determine that it has a high density of quality content, which is Zhihu's advantage in the future.

Without the support of technological innovation, the giants cannot be shaken. Zhihu has no hope of squeezing into the first echelon for the time being, but due to Zhihu's deep Q&A moat and the difficulty of accumulation in the Q&A field, no one can shake Zhihu's position in the short term. It can be predicted that Zhihu will remain in the second echelon for a long time.

Zhihu's ranking fluctuates around 100. Given that Zhihu's commercialization level is still low and imperfect, and its entertainment business, which focuses on attracting traffic, has just started not long ago, Zhihu still has a lot of room for improvement.

Zhihu History Introduction:

I divide the Zhihu process into four parts: the knowledge stage, the social stage, the commercialization stage, and the entertainment stage.

• The users are mainly elites, and the purpose is to form culture and accumulate high-quality resources in various sections in the knowledge-based stage.
• After completing the initial accumulation and obtaining expansion content capital and cultural capital, the platform will be opened to the public, broadening the scope of Q&A and active users, making Q&A more popular and life-oriented.
• After its social nature was proven, Zhihu's registered users reached tens of millions, and it began to explore business models, gaining favor from the capital market and competing with ByteDance. In the third stage, Zhihu attacked everywhere, resisted attacks, and explored commercial models for both the C-end and B-end.
• With defeating ByteDance as an important symbol, Zhihu, as an absolute monopolist in the question-and-answer field, has become the darling of the capital market and has raised a large amount of funds. It has made strong moves in videos, copyrights, books, creator incentives, etc., sinking users, increasing media forms, broadening content channels, and entertaining to increase platform stickiness and urgently increase monetization channels.

It can be seen that although Zhihu's action trajectory seems slow overall (Zhihu and WeChat were launched in the same year, but WeChat had 300 million users in 2013, while Zhihu only had 400,000), its pace has been very steady. It was very cautious about its core business in the early and middle stages, and in the middle and late stages and now, it has monopolized the core business and expanded rapidly. This kind of planning is quite like that of a general who wins first and then fights.

Basic data of Zhihu:

• Zhihu's barriers are extremely solid. According to data provided by Analysys, Zhihu's industry penetration rate of active users is 97.3%, and its usage time is 99.1%. When it comes to obtaining opinions around a problem, Zhihu is unrivaled.
• Zhihu is highly tool-oriented, with a retention rate of 18.8%. Bilibili, which is also next-generation-oriented, has a retention rate of 60.4%. The retention rates of other software are generally around 50%. Zhihu’s slogan “If there is a question, there is an answer” is only half written, and the second half is “If there is no problem, I will never open it.”

Zhihu’s information architecture:

From the perspective of information architecture, it can be seen that Zhihu is in a period of intense expansion. Apart from the reasonable layout of the message function, the "My", "Members", and "First" are relatively redundant and are in the exploration stage of general business. The video is less mature and there is not enough video accumulation.

Zhihu's content business:

Zhihu's content media forms are divided into four parts: live broadcast, video, text, and audio. As can be seen from the above picture, Zhihu covers almost all popular media forms. The content structure is very broad, and the idea of ​​going out of the circle is very heavy. The situation of bilibili is similar, but there is one thing that is very different. Bilibili's genes are inherently entertaining, and there is not much resistance to sinking. Zhihu's question-and-answer business will inevitably be damaged when the business sinks, causing a gap in Zhihu's core moat, losing authoritative content, and losing "good" content. What is good content?

• Good content can grow on its own and, like classic books, will circulate for a long time. When there are relevant questions, it will be brought up and its interest and professionalism can go beyond the circle.
• Good content covers a wide enough range, covers enough media forms, and has a long-tail effect.
• Good content has enough information, high information density, authority and content quality.
• Good content can be accumulated, which requires that the copyright is owned by the owner and that one can build his own moat.

As the crowd moves downward, it loses authority and content quality. Although there will be a large number of questions and answers in the short term to ensure the quality of answers, if we look at it in terms of 5 or 10 years, the loss of core creative users caused by the downward movement, especially the loss of PGC for the purpose of sharing, will create bullets for other platforms to break Zhihu's monopoly on the question and answer industry.

Zhihu's core business is to link answerers and questioners with low cost in a question-centered manner, create a good atmosphere willing to discuss, gather users willing to think and users willing to read long articles, mobilize the inner motivation of creators, distribute answers and questions to users and creators through human and algorithm filtering, and generate content sedimentation. Therefore, creators who can solve problems need to have a corresponding user group and form a corresponding question-answering culture. This is something Zhihu must do, otherwise it will greatly increase the operating costs of the platform and there will be a lack of good answers.

Zhihu from the perspective of business model:

Classified by business objects, it can be divided into B-end and C-end; classified by business type, it can be divided into traffic payment and content payment. The B-end has a high degree of overlap with traffic payment, while the C-end mainly pays for content.

Taking the test launch of a content recommendation type e-commerce APP as an example, the cost of new customers is between 70 yuan and 122 yuan. After three months of continuous launch, the ROI reaches 1:1.74. Zhihu users have strong payment capabilities and are suitable for the launch of low-frequency, high-consumption products.

Zhihu is particularly suitable for selling big items, whether it is Dafei's drum washing machine and pulsator washing machine, or the monthly introduction of LCD TVs that achieved a GMV of 50 million, it shows that Zhihu caters to the needs of cautious and rational consumption. With the improvement of education and the increase of the new middle class, consumers hope to have channels that can explain in a detailed and easy-to-understand way what products are good and what are not, starting from the principles. This is an area of ​​long-form content where Zhihu has an advantage.

The future consumption trend is experiential and rational: consumers want to compare prices from different stores and get a lot of advice; brand superstition is eliminated in online reviews, and customers pay more attention to experience rather than the manufacturer's unilateral narrative; they hope that the products are as simple as possible, easy to use and complete in accessories; only those that can meet consumer needs more meticulously will be favored, even if the price is higher.

Popular science marketing is the trend of the future and is Zhihu’s strength and important growth point.

The main group of people who pay for knowledge are those between 25 and 35 years old, with an income between 3k and 10k. They have not yet achieved a satisfactory standard of living, but at the same time, they are young and energetic, and have the motivation and desire to improve their knowledge and living standards.

As can be seen from the above figure, there are three pain points in the knowledge payment business:

The repurchase rate is not high. To solve the repurchase rate problem, in addition to improving the quality of content, increasing the value obtained by customers and improving the repurchase rate, we should also start with user incentives and user reminders, starting from opening the APP every day, signing in, weekly learning plans, monthly learning plans, annual learning plans, incentives for completing plans, etc., so that users can feel that they can learn on this platform, and have a sense of self-discipline and planning when learning, thereby enhancing their sense of accomplishment.

Poor content quality:

To ensure the quality of content, we cannot allow low-quality knowledge payment producers to be tied to the platform's interests. We must attach importance to user opinion, allow users to get unconditional refunds within a certain random class period, prevent authors from only making the first few videos, ban low-quality answers, and ban low-quality producers. By mobilizing the power of users, the platform and users actively cooperate to screen out low-quality producers and achieve a healthy ecology.

Insufficient content:

The amount of content comes from internal incubation and external diversion. For internal incubation, it should be divided into a three-tier structure: willing answerers, answerers with some achievements, and answerers who become big Vs. This will be discussed in detail below.

From the user's perspective:

Zhihu's target user types:

Zhihu users are characterized by being young and middle-aged, and the main users are concentrated around Generation Z, which is composed of four types of people: those who have just entered college, those who are about to graduate and face work, those who have worked in the workplace for a few years, and the new middle class. The target group of Zhihu is:

• Generation Z
• Lazy Home
• Small town youth
• female

Lazy home economy:

The lazy economy is mainly based on relaxation and entertainment, and has a certain desire for improvement. They are willing to go out and exercise for health. The entertainment activities that attract them are mainly videos. At the same time, the companionship of the community is also very important to alleviate loneliness. In order to please them, Zhihu needs to develop circles and video programs.

“She” Economy:

According to iResearch's survey, the gender ratio of Zhihu is balanced, with 51% male and 49% female. I highly doubt the accuracy of this survey.

• Unknown gender is not indicated.
• Judging from the crawler reports I searched, Zhihu obviously has more men than women. The crawler reports generally show 30%+ women, 55%+ men, and 15% unknown gender.
• There are very few women who are labeled as male, but there are often men who are labeled as female.
• Zhihu lacks content that is biased towards women and has no appeal to women.

According to data, the consumer market is contributed by 70% female consumers. Clothing consumption accounted for 89%, maternal and child products consumption accounted for 87%, cosmetics consumption accounted for 83%, and household products consumption accounted for 78%.

Women love socializing, videos, food and other life and entertainment content. Zhihu develops social circles to increase the social nature of Zhihu, and adds related content such as cosmetics, clothing, emotions, parent-child, topics, etc. to make the interface more beautiful. These are ways for Zhihu to attract women.

Gen Z Economy:

Through the analysis report of iiMedia, we can learn that:

• Generation Z was born in a period of superior living conditions and the rise of the Internet. Most of them have received a good education and have high humanistic qualities.
• Generation Z has less financial pressure and a strong awareness of paying.
• The Z generation’s way of communication is faster, more online and timely, which is reflected in instant video interaction, instant singing, instant barrage communication, etc.
• The favorite forms of entertainment for Generation Z are animation and short videos. As they grow older, their demands for growth and career will gradually increase, and they will be the main force in knowledge payment in the future.

Small town youth economy:

The characteristics of young people in small towns are: they have plenty of time but few ways to entertain themselves, they rely on the Internet for entertainment and have little financial pressure.

As described in "Cognitive Surplus", television is the second job of the American people. This statement is no exception in China. Film and television are the media forms that can most easily bring immersive experiences and are the most popular media forms among users. The most unified form of entertainment for the above four groups is video entertainment. This is the part where Zhihu has already started and is striving to rise. Next, it should increase investment in the video field, which is the key part to breaking the low retention rate.

Secondly, the need for sharing and instant information is increasing, and the need for expanding women's favorite beauty, parent-child, shopping content, e-books, and health is also gradually increasing.

2.2 Zhihu from the founder’s perspective

Zhou Yuan's experience and personality traits:

Zhou Yuan comes from a wealthy family.

Zhou Yuan was born into a well-off middle-class family. In 1996, his family got their first 386 laptop computer. At that time, a mid-range Lenovo laptop cost about 12,000 yuan. The housing price in Beijing was 4,100 yuan per square meter, but now the housing price in Beijing is 17,212 yuan per square meter. It can be seen that his family is quite well-off.

Both my parents are highly educated. My father is a media practitioner. He is serious about his work and is an elite in the industry. My mother is an English teacher. English teachers born in 1996 are quite rare, at least equivalent to the current graduate student level. Both my parents are highly educated.

Zhou Yuan's mother is an educator and his father is a journalist - these have become his two major advantages. His father's identity as a journalist has enabled him to understand the secret of how information is transmitted between people, and his mother's identity as a tolerant educator has made him like to think and share knowledge - understanding of information and understanding of education are important conditions for the establishment of Zhihu.

Three characteristics of Zhou Yuan's personality:

1) Ideal

In 2000, the first year of the new century, Zhou Yuan, who was less than 20 years old, imagined the future and told others on the train about his life plan - to write programs until he was 35 and then study astronomy. The other party regarded Zhou Yuan’s words as the immature wishful thinking of a child, shook his head and smiled and said, how much money can a programmer make? Zhou Yuan believes that this is not about making money, it is about the view of the world.

Zhou Yuan's youth was always surrounded by the innocent and enterprising temperament of romanticism. "Only real suffering can drive away the suffering of romantic fantasy...Abandonment without a fight is hypocritical, detachment without the tempering of disasters is frivolous, and escapism from reality is cowardly." Zhou Yuan regarded this passage from "The Three Stories of Giants" as a treasure. He copied it down and posted it in his dormitory. His friends thought he was a middle school student, but he kept it posted for his entire four years in college.

During the mobile Internet boom, whoever wins the hearts of the people wins the world, and the bigwigs are fighting fiercely to grab territory. However, Zhou Yuan has become an outlier of the era - in an era where everyone is flooded with content and entertainment is king, he realized that people cannot tolerate the flooding of low-quality content for long, smelled the demand for high-quality content, and went to the opposite side of the trend of the times: quietly building a high-quality community, a community that accumulates content.

Zhou Yuan once said earlier that "traffic and scale are not Zhihu's goals." This sentence guided Zhihu's early development. From now on, it is obvious that Zhihu does not want traffic and scale, but always maintains "content first, traffic is subordinate", first building high-quality communities and content, and then seeking expansion.

After Zhou Yuan took the postgraduate entrance examination, he thought he had not done well and was in a bad mood and very depressed. At this time, his father sent him a text message: The most important thing for a person is not to lose his high spirits. If you don’t have that high-spirited state, even if you get a good result, it may not be really good. Zhou Yuan said, "This sentence has influenced me to this day." After that, no setbacks could discourage him for too long. After the failure of Meta’s entrepreneurship, he traveled to Tibet to relax and reflected: "Most entrepreneurs often fall into misconceptions, taking the understanding and suggestions of a few people as real market demands, and promoting products based on these imaginary demands, which results in a further and further distance from real demands." Then, only two months later, he started another business and founded Zhihu.

Zhou Yuan remained undeterred when facing investors. When an investor found Zhou Yuan, he asked him how many users Zhihu would have that year. Zhou Yuan told the other party that there would be about 20,000. The investor responded by finding an excuse and leaving. Faced with the difficult road to financing and the temptation of the trend of the times, Zhou Yuan did not compromise with scale and traffic. Instead, he became more paranoid. In choosing investors, he did not consider who paid more, but rather whether the investor understood Zhihu.

When Zhou Yuan was asked why he gave up his well-paid career as a journalist and chose to start a business, he said: "It was definitely not for money, nor for improving life. At that time, I felt that as a journalist, I could discover, interview, write and publish, but I just couldn't verify it. I was not the one who made things happen."

Independent, stubborn, visionary, dreamy - this constitutes the idealistic part of his character.

2) Open

Zhou Yuan has mentioned the importance of openness many times, and mentioned that Zhihu should be open. When discussing the future of Zhihu at an internal meeting in 2013, it was finally decided that Zhihu should "serve more people, connect more people, and solve more problems." During an interview, someone asked him: "What do you believe in most? "He replied: "I believe in change the most."

Someone once asked on Zhihu: What is the determining factor of the deficiency between you and your goal? He replied: stay foolish, stay hungry.

The Zhihu team is a team that advocates hacker culture. "Hackers and Painters" is a must-read for the team and everyone has a copy. The team atmosphere is very lively, with constant laughter and no solemn sense of hierarchical structure - the office does not have a company sign but a pirate flag.

Zhou Yuan has always called the team "pirates" and their behavior is relatively equal, like a big family. One employee’s signature was: “Making a good product is like having sex with a beautiful woman, making a bad product is like having sex with a bear.” Zhou Yuan asked him weakly: “Is Zhihu a good product or a bad product?” The employee replied: “Don’t disturb me from having sex with a beautiful woman.”

3) Elegant and easy-going

Zhou Yuan is not a leader like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Jack Ma who has charisma and can influence others by charging ahead. Instead, he is a leader like Bill Gates or Ma Huateng who can patiently plan and operate behind the scenes.

From "Pirates" and the dubbing for Zhihu's promotional video, we can see that Zhou Yuan loves Steve Jobs very much. The dubbing for the promotion is an imitation of Jobs. I have heard Jobs' version of Think different, which was actually quite good, but Jobs rejected it because he was not satisfied with the dubbing. In comparison, the dubbing for Zhihu's promotional video was too stiff. Zhou Yuan is indeed not used to the position of a public spokesperson. When watching the program for Zhihu's tenth anniversary, I felt that he was sweating with nervousness.

His caring, gentle and easy-going side can also be seen in his attitude towards users. When the latest Salt Club meeting was held in 2016, the government approved 750 people, but in the end 2,000 people showed up. After the guest Wan Qing started singing, the outside field was out of control for a while. Finally, Zhou Yuan decided to remove all the advertisers' booths to make room for outside friends.

For people who are determined to make a career, one cannot think that a person is easy to get along with, gentle, or even indecisive just because he appears to be easy to get along with and elegant. I believe that a person who never gives up and can go against the trend to take a company public must have an uncompromising and decisive side, and a side that is willing to dedicate himself, give up quickly, and is pragmatic in his career.

Do these three points add up to look like Zhihu?

Although Zhihu will not be shaped entirely according to Zhou Yuan's wishes, many traces of Zhou Yuan's personality can be seen in the development of Zhihu.

• Zhou Yuan couldn't stand being an unknown part of the trend, so he decided to make Zhihu bigger and stronger. Zhihu could have chosen to be a quiet community like Douban, but Zhihu chose to expand.
• Zhouyuan has always been open, with open media forms, open users, and relatively open communication content (no excessive dilution allowed, no violation of supervision allowed). Maintaining an open mind allows Zhihu to accommodate more users.
• Zhou Yuan's elegance and easy-going nature determine that he has high requirements for the community atmosphere. Although Zhihu has indeed seen a decrease in PGC and dilution of high-quality answers due to its sinking, it cannot be denied that Zhihu is the platform with the highest requirements for atmosphere among the major Internet platforms, and is often criticized by users for overly strict enforcement.

What is Zhihu like in Zhou Yuan’s eyes?

Combining his answers on Zhihu, remarks in various interviews and the team's internal letters, we can outline an outline of Zhihu. These speeches have similar cores and cover a large time span. They are not official clichés. Especially in Zhou Yuan's answers on Zhihu, many answers can make people suddenly enlightened. His views on entrepreneurship, financing, and teams are very worthy of young people to listen to the path of a veteran.

http://Apple4us.com had a huge impact on Zhou Yuan. The prototype of Zhihu came from the idea of ​​"magnifying Apple4us 1,000 times". In this product, people can communicate at low cost and high efficiency, allowing people with questions to propose topics and people who are interested to answer questions. What Zhihu needs to do is to organize them and build a community that encourages them to give high-quality answers, so that the answers can be precipitated and everyone can express their opinions for everyone to use.

When creating a high-quality community, there is a core question that cannot be avoided: Why are the talented people so busy every day? Why write long articles on Zhihu?

Zhou Yuan quoted a passage from John Doerr (founder of venture capital fund KPCB): "When I was very young, all the knowledge I had was taught by my mentor. I can never repay him in this life. The only thing I can do is to teach what I have learned to others."

Among Zhou Yuan’s various speeches, 11 key ones were selected:

For New Users:

What is Q&A Social?

Basic work of Zhihu:

Zhihu and Wikipedia:

Talking about the future of Zhihu:

How to get high-quality answers:

It puts forward four things that Zhihu needs to achieve: cost, scale, culture, and clarity.

1. Cost, that is, the cost of producing high-quality answers centered on the topic and linking questioners and answerers should be low.
2. Scale, that is, the diversity of questions and the diversity of answers, is rich and diverse.
3. Culture, that is, consensus, means that most people have an intuitive and emotional understanding of what Zhihu is.
4. Clarity. If culture is cognitive clarity, clarity is the clarity of the program information architecture, which can clearly let users know what is what, how to do it, and what are the rewards and punishments.

Three ways to manage a community: co-governance, crowd arbitration, and government.

• Co-governance: Everyone in the community governs together, and everyone can take responsibility to maintain and promote excellent answers and maintain community consensus through social distribution methods such as reporting, liking, and opposing.
• Crowd Judgement: Select elite users to maintain the community and judge controversial content. A similar view is expressed in the must-read book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Zhihu users: "The orthodox planning theories and large-scale urban construction practices in the United States and the entire Western world have ruthlessly stifled the vitality of cities."
• Supervision: For daily things that clearly violate boundaries, Zhihu will use manual review, algorithm review and other means to quickly eliminate them.

Three aspects of Zhihu’s future: smart community, tool scenarios, and business matrix.

In an internal email about financing, Zhou Yuan proposed three core strategies to the team: "smart community", "tool scenarios" and "business matrix". The smart community that Zhihu wants to achieve has both the sense of identity and trust brought about by interpersonal interaction in the community and the precision and scalability driven by AI. We fully recognize and respect different viewpoints, opinions and values, and while ensuring a serious, professional and friendly community atmosphere, we meet diverse content consumption needs on a large scale and in a personalized manner. I hope that the value of Zhihu is not limited to a small number of people, but can benefit a wider range of people.

Three aspects of community culture: recognizable exclusive vocabulary, establishment of consensus values, and high tolerance and firm rejection of differences.

Being in the United States and just got off the plane is the first lexical feature of Zhihu.

Form a "healthy discussion convention" and create a crowd arbitration system where everyone participates in community maintenance and acts as a referee together.

Welcome users with an open mind, defend scientific rationality, promote independent thinking, oppose ignorance and anti-intellectualism, and crack down on ridicule and abuse.

Brand building:

These are the first two pictures that catch our eyes. The meaning that Zhihu wants to convey first is very clear, that is, the vastness and authority of the Zhihu Q&A world. What follows is a common means of establishing a brand - being associated with great things, just like Mengniu says it is the milk of astronauts, Nike says it is the shoes that fight together with athletes, and Apple injects the unique atmosphere into its products.

Summarizing the above information, we can get the outline of Zhihu in Zhou Yuan’s mind:

The core business of Zhihu is to connect people with questions at a low cost. Through the platform's clear structure and the good atmosphere it maintains, it makes people willing to communicate, produce good answers, and accumulate these answers. This platform is a question-and-answer platform based on social interaction. It is not like Wikipedia, which simply aims to get standard answers. Instead, it is full of personal atmosphere, and each respondent expresses his or her own experience and emotions.

The most important thing on this platform is culture. The greatest asset of any platform is a loyal community. However, a loyal community does not appear out of thin air. Instead, the platform develops unique norms, culture and common expectations by cultivating a vibrant community, which becomes a source of lasting value. Culture is the source of Zhihu's ability to produce high quality at low cost.

Good users, a good atmosphere, and good answerers can enable the right people to produce good answers. The corresponding relationship among users, answerers, and atmosphere is the secret to Zhihu's success. In Zhihu, long answers written with care can be recognized and cared about by others. This scenario constitutes the uniqueness of Zhihu, and forming this scenario is Zhou Yuan's central goal for Zhihu.

After this central scene was formed, Zhihu began to expand, and naturally, as the scale of the platform expanded, commercial and algorithmic needs were extended. Zhihu's change from the forum's classified discussion model to a topic discussion model was an important reason for the increase in the upper limit of its scale, and the algorithm made the platform's user carrying capacity almost unlimited.

3. Problems and solutions of Zhihu

To summarize the above, analyze Zhihu’s shortcomings and advantages, and conclude what to do next.

Will inevitably move towards commercialization: Zhou Yuan's ambition, the financing carried out by Zhihu, and the funds needed for Zhihu to operate the platform all indicate that Zhihu must move towards commercial entertainment.

AcFun has already told Zhihu the importance of profitability through its own experience.

Commercialization and entertainment will lead to a large influx of low-end users, dilute high-quality answerers and high-quality answers, and damage the core competitiveness of Zhihu: the community culture that can produce high-quality answers at low cost will be damaged. Excessive entry of new users will disrupt the stable community expansion model, cause too drastic social and cultural reconstruction, and cause the community to lose its core competitiveness.

People have a natural obsession with belonging. Once old users feel that this is not the Zhihu of the past, they will not produce high-quality answers even if they stay here. Zhihu must sink, but sinking will inevitably damage its core competitiveness.

Zhihu has proven through actual combat that its monopoly in the question-and-answer field is very solid. This monopoly cannot be broken in a short period of time by capital + traffic + algorithm. It is necessary to find high-quality users, establish high-quality communities, and complete high-quality accumulation before we can compete with Zhihu.

Zhihu’s retention rate is very low and its instrumentality is too strong. Retention needs to be strengthened, but strengthening retention means weakening its instrumentality.

Therefore, Zhihu needs to solve two contradictions:

1. The contradiction between authority and entertainment.
2. The contradiction between instrumentality and retention rate.

Authority will be instrumental, and high entertainment will lead to retention rate. The essential contradiction of Zhihu is two points that must be done: as a commercial platform, it must go down to acquire users and it must be entertaining. As a question-and-answer platform, Zhihu must establish authoritative recognition in the minds of users. The contradiction of Zhihu is essentially the impossible triangle of social networking: content quality, number of users, and user profitability cannot be achieved at the same time.

Clear understanding - hard-core answers are a necessity in the question-and-answer ecosystem.

Although hard-core answers do not have high commercial value, they are necessities in the Q&A community and are the authoritative source of the Q&A community. The essence of business war is cognitive war. When you make users think that you are a professional Q&A community, Zhihu can maintain its monopoly position as a Q&A platform. The hard-core answer is exactly the existence of Zhihu's spiritual totem. The role of hard-core answers on Zhihu is just like the role of anime on Bilibili, which clarifies your positioning in business wars, so that users can know Zhihu when they think of Q&A. Just as people know bilibili when they think of anime, people do not have the energy to remember something with unclear positioning.

Now the question is how to make Zhihu sink and how to ensure the quality of the answers.

According to the survey report of Zhihu user Lu Shihan: Where did the praise number go?

You can learn the following information:

1. Hardcore content is a necessity for Zhihu ecosystem, but it lacks recommendations and distribution methods. In other words, if the platform intentionally distributes it, the audience should not catch a cold.
2. Old users are criticizing Zhihu's authority as a question-and-answer community, complaining that there are fewer and fewer high-quality answers, more and more marketing accounts and more and more answers, and the main loss of high-quality answers and the dilution of high-quality answers.
3. Hardcore content has low commercial returns, few audiences, and difficult production. Most of the creators of vertical content are PGCs. They make high profits on weekdays, and the purpose of creation is mostly sharing and teaching. In order to see that some people benefit from their knowledge, gain recognition from peers, and readers, it is difficult to use money to motivate their creation, or the motivation of money will significantly reduce the quality of answers.
4. The formula for the number of likes is: Field》》》》》》》》 Number of answers》》》》》 The official recommendation is that each living area has serious traffic and each block is very unbalanced.

The following figure shows the sample number of each block, and the picture comes from the Internet.

Life content crushes other content, and other content is difficult to obtain traffic. The answer to the best scientific and technological answers is genetically determined that it is not a match for beauty and food issues.

3.1 Solution

Zhihu needs to keep up and down at the same time, and four user behaviors that need to be met:

How to solve the contradiction between sinking and floating: The answer is that it cannot be solved if they exist in a community.

The solution is to vertically classify Zhihu and establish a dual ecological community:

Obviously, Zhihu's advantages are exactly the opposite of Toutiao. If the content distribution model continues to favor algorithm distribution, the connection between creators and content consumers will become increasingly thin. When the idea function is weakened, the column is not taken seriously, and the comments are becoming less and less focused, it will be very harmful to the creators.

On the one hand, there is a hard-core community mainly based on vertical content, elite users, and social distribution. Content distribution is difficult to correctly distribute complex content, which will weaken the connection between creators and content consumers, and simply turn creators' creations into tools to please readers. When their own ideas are weakened, columns are not valued, and answers are becoming increasingly untuned, it will cause great harm to PGC targeting sharing.

On the other hand, there is an entertainment community that mainly focuses on general content, mass users, and algorithm distribution. Because the mass community is huge and prefers entertainment, using algorithms can just adapt to the needs of OGC. OGC can quickly know the templates to please the public and quickly compete for traffic.

That is, the deepest thing should be heavy enough and the floating thing should be floating enough, so as to meet the needs of both vertical and general activities by creating a dual community.

The dual community model is shown in the figure:

3.2 Solutions to the problem

Solve the problem in two directions:

The entertainment community aims to increase retention, expand content, activate fans and promote output.

Hard-core communities aim to protect the atmosphere, with dual communities, verbal assessment, and light serialization.

Increase retention:

Live fans: Friend card service.

Friends card needs to do:

• Conservative is an attempt to the fan economy of Q&A platform. At the beginning, there were only Zhika level and Zhika badge services, without any services or privileges.
• Incentives are for the purpose of activating fans and answerers, and the income from the friend card is not divided into friends, and they are all left to the answerers.
• Challenge, set up high-difficulty and interesting friends tasks (the difficulty in the picture is not high enough), so that friends levels become authoritative.
• Customize, the answerer can customize the badge with the culture of his fan base.
• If the experience value of the friend card is not obtained on that day, the experience value will be reduced by 20 per day. If the experience value is negative 200, the friend card of the answerer will be automatically cancelled.

UI interface of Zhiyou Card:

Take Bobo and his friends as an example:

Estimated income of Zhiyou Card:

Based on Douyu's data, the data comes from the Internet:

According to Douyu Live's card application rate as an example, Douyu's card application rate is about 1% on average. Considering that Douyu takes card application as a key business promotion, it is a reasonable prediction to halve Zhihu's card application rate.

Currently, Zhihu MUD is 55 million, and the monthly retention is 0.2, which means 80% of the users are replaced every month. Now, assuming that the card application rate is 0.5%, there will be 15% of the users repetitions every month. The calculation process is as follows:

If no new users enter and only one card is applied for by Zhicard users, Zhicard income will approach the upper limit in 2 years. At this time, it is 17.06 million yuan in profits, with an average monthly income of 1.41 million yuan. If you apply for two cards, you will get 34.12 million yuan, with an average monthly income of 2.83 million yuan.

This money is not much for the platform, and the platform does not have to compete with the answerer at all. The main function of Zhiyou Card on the platform is to activate fans, activate the answerer, and increase the connection between the answerer and the fans. Whether it is feasible for fans to pay on the social platform to experiment with Q&A social platform, the answerer can be allowed to launch Zhika columns depending on the situation.

General content:

Pan-content needs to deepen the content pool, inviting celebrities to settle in, obtain exclusive content, and please core users. The main purpose is to break the circle.

Pleasing core users: the four types of users of Z era, "She Economy", small town youth, and lazy home economy are the main force of Zhihu's downward trend.

Their common point is that they like videos, sharing, and instant news. For female users who Zhihu lacks, Zhihu should make up for this shortcoming and introduce more beauty, parent-child, and emotional content. Zhihu has not done enough to share the need for sharing, so we should find the opportunity to focus on promoting the circle.

Luo Xiang is invited to say that the Criminal Law and Bureau Directors have a reputation and famous quality opinion leaders, and the entry of low-quality traffic such as traffic stars and face artists for the time being will not consider the entry of low-quality traffic. This will reduce Zhihu's brand awareness. After inviting high-quality traffic to enter, it will not only enrich the depth and width of the content, but also attract users who like to discuss and have high quality.

Get exclusive content:

Exclusive content includes signed KOLs, buying exclusive copyrighted programs, homemade programs, platform-solidated answers, etc. In most platforms, the platform has not formed a unique culture, and people's loyalty to the platform is far less than that to the program.

Create a popular product promotional video:

The promotional video of Houlang has a huge impact on the circle. Houlang plays 30 million in bilibili. Today, when Houlang launched, I have seen discussions about Houlang in various circles of friends and QQ groups, and the marketing effect is very significant.

Promote output:

Then, the answerer's incentive method was not discussed in the above article of knowledge payment, and the answerer was divided into three levels and different incentive methods were given respectively.

Divide the answerer into three levels:

Level 1 answerer: Avoid loss and focus on taking care of it. Signing contracts and acting as an artist, and becoming a traffic star.

Level 2 answerer: Find promising answerer key training, carry out training courses offline and online, so that they can strive to overcome bottlenecks and be promoted to Level 1 answerer.

Level 3 answerer: Carry out a new star incentive plan to provide space for answerers who have initially proven their abilities and are willing to develop on Zhihu, sign bets, carry out online courses, let big Vs lead small Vs, and set up a bottleneck line for likes, playback, reading, etc. If you pass the line, you can apply to join the incentive plan.

If the first and second level answerers are willing, they can designate a master-apprentice relationship for the third level answerers, and the master can obtain the apprentice's income share.

3.3 Protect the atmosphere

Hardcore section:

Purpose of the hardcore sector:

• Relying on the social interaction of high-end creators to screen answers, a high-end platform filtered by high-end creators is built in the lower structure of machine distribution. In the past, Zhihu was not large enough and it was not necessary to do this, but now it is very necessary.
• Win the cognitive battle and establish Zhihu totem. The hard-core sector can tell users the "story" of Zhihu and establish Zhihu's identity.
• To enable hard-core culture and entertainment culture to coexist, both parties can find their own belongings.

How to implement the hardcore sector:

William James wrote in Principles of Psychology:

If feasible, the cruelest punishment for a person is like this: give him freedom and let him enjoy himself in society, but he also regards it as nothing, and does not give him any attention at all. When he appeared, the others were not even willing to look sideways; when he spoke, no one responded, and no one cared about any of his behavior. If everyone around us ignores us when we see us and ignores our existence, it won’t take long to be filled with anger and we can feel a strong and inexplicable despair.

Hardcore content is natural non-commercial. OGC needs to be traffic-oriented, while UGC is not professional enough. Using money to mobilize PGC to create will cost a lot and make low returns. If you want to mobilize PGC, you must motivate your recognition and create an exclusive exposure environment for them, so that creators who know how to appreciate and how difficult they create will promote the works they appreciate.

There are many answerers on Zhihu who are capable of writing professional answers, but they do not have the motivation to write professional answers, strictly verify, carefully create, quote scriptures and arguments, and write professional long articles. Who can read them? No one can stand the things he wrote with his heart and can only sink infinitely.

For vertical knowledge producers, they should be given enough honors and enough recommendations, and they should be discovered as soon as possible, included as soon as possible, recommended as soon as possible, and easy to retrieve. Although vertical knowledge producers are not loved by traffic, this is the key to Zhihu's differentiation and the key to monopolizing the field of Q&A community. What Zhihu users really need is that they can gain a comprehensive and profound perspective on every question, and vertical and general knowledge is indispensable.

In this way, authoritative content will be motivated and will continue to produce and accumulate. While Zhihu inevitably moves towards commercialization, it will maintain Zhihu's core competitiveness. Only when Zhihu is raised high enough can it be safe to sink and sink deeper.

Design principles of hardcore section:

• Authoritative, only senior creators can give hardcore labels. I have answered 8 questions and 300 likes. The creator level is close to Lv5. It can be seen that Lv5 is quite easy to achieve, so creators above Lv7 have the right to give hardcore labels.
• Limited, limiting the number of times each person is given to ensure scarcity.
• Honors, only answers that enter the hardcore sector can be selected for reading daily newspapers, and often provide commemorative rewards to active respondents in the hardcore sector.
• Enter method 1: Hard-core recognition enters. The answer to entering the hard-core sector does not consider the number of approvals, collections, likes, etc. at all. Only consider the number of hard-core recognition. At the same time, avoid sectors such as life and emotion that dominate the hard-core sectors with natural traffic superiority. Set corresponding weights according to the different traffic of each sector, and set unique weights for strict and serious creators. If the creator is trustworthy, he can be given the right to pass.
• Entering method 2: Review and enter. You can apply for review and enter the hard-core section in two situations: 1. The hard-core recognition value is close to the standard-to-compliance indicator line. 2. Answerers with more hard-core answers can submit them for review after completing the creation.
• Voting to kick out: A certain content in the hardcore sector is not recognized by high-end creators. You can initiate a vote to decide whether to kick out the answer, strictly maintain the lack of nothing than a bad one, and ensure the authority of the hardcore sector.

The UI interface is as follows:

The number of times that hard-core recognition and answers to the hard-core sector are displayed in personal achievements.

Add hardcore section:

Add red label promotion like live broadcasts to add unique labels to the answers to the hardcore sector.

Modify the UI near the comment:

Changes to professional medals:

For example, this answer is unit conversion, automobile, aerospace, and imperial labels, but it was given professional badges by architectural designers and Latin American history experts.

Originally, professional recognition is similar to hard-core recognition, which is a means of mutual recognition among high-end creators. This part of the functions has been replaced by hard-core recognition. The status of professional medals should be further improved, and only the answerer is allowed to give professional labels in the same section.

Light serialization:

After the hardcore sector is launched, the answerer will improve the quality of the answers, and it is expected that the number of rigorous long articles will increase rapidly. The launch of catalog functions, the addition of updates and corresponding modules are the functions of the supporting hardcore sector.

Release directory functions:

It is very inconvenient to read articles with tens of thousands of words, and it requires quick search of the directory function.

Improved update function:

Added the update function to my - function selection.

Click to follow the update interface:

Take the exam before speaking:

Only by strictly protecting the old atmosphere can Zhihu go down with confidence and rapid. If the old culture is not protected well, the community will lose its original consensus. Building a community with a dual-cultural idea is a means to achieve the coexistence of new and old users, hard-core knowledge and pan-entertainment.

The understanding of the atmosphere is an intuitive understanding formed in the same environment with more brains. In a community like Zhihu, which has a relatively unique and high demand for the atmosphere, new users are likely to be blocked by speaking only according to the speech habits of other platforms. Therefore, they complain about Zhihu, which will reduce the community atmosphere and cause misunderstandings. This can be avoided to a greater extent when speaking exams.

• The exam is only for comments, speeches, and private chats, and users can use other functions at will.
• The design direction of the exam is to make it smelly, long and difficult. The main purpose is to make the user not have the patience to finish it in a short time, so that the user can form the intuition of Zhihu culture when visiting Zhihu many times.

Questions such as:

4. Report summary

This article revolves around three points:

This leads to the core contradiction between Zhihu: the contradiction between commercialization and Q&A community culture.

It means that both are indispensable, and it is impossible to choose one and give up the other. Culture is Zhihu's core competitiveness. Once the unique production mechanism around quality answers is lost, Zhihu's core barriers will gradually be weakened. Although Zhihu currently has a large amount of content accumulation as a solid barrier, after losing quality content, the near future will one day lose its leading position.

To explore ways to resolve conflicts, the answer to this article is to build a dual community system vertically classified. In terms of downsizing, the first priority is to retain it. There are three points in the task: general content, liven fans, and promote production, with the purpose of increasing the number of content and the enthusiasm of fans. In terms of upward development, there are three tasks: dual community, light serialization, and speech assessment, with the purpose of creating a hard-core community built by elite creators by social distribution.

Author: Wang Zai1610

Source: Wang Zai 1610