Paid Q&A is on the decline: content is scarce and big IPs bring in significant but unstable traffic

As one of the earliest users of Zhihu Live, Zhao Ming has recently purchased fewer and fewer new courses. Not only Zhihu Live, but also a column on "Get" that he purchased a year ago, he has not logged in to check for several months. Zhao Ming also noticed that the paid Q&A that was once popular in WeChat Moments is almost gone.

At present, the actual turnover of mainstream knowledge payment platforms in the past year was mostly in the tens of millions of yuan level. This is a big improvement for the originally free knowledge community, but this number is still pitifully small compared with e-commerce and O2O platforms.

The trend of paying for knowledge seems to have passed.

Paid Q&A is on the decline

In 2016, the question-and-answer model became one of the detonating points for paid knowledge. Fenda quickly completed two rounds of financing, A and A+, that year. Zhihu's question-and-answer product "Zhihu" was also one of the products that described the bright prospects of paid knowledge. But just one year later, all platforms gradually reduced their investment in this type of product.

"After we had launched our paid product for a while, we realized that paying for knowledge was not a particularly big opportunity." An insider of Hongdou Live told reporters that Hongdou Live is a voice live broadcast product invested by Weibo. It tried paid live broadcast last year, but soon discovered that users were extremely picky about paid content, and some relatively superficial content could hardly attract users to pay.

"Knowledge payment platforms lack scalability. In the future, such platforms will be the stage for skill knowledge and big Vs (groups with great fame and traffic)." Sun Zhichao, who once hosted a Zhihu live on gaming topics, told reporters that knowledge payment platforms "will have no place for ordinary people" in the future. Sun Zhichao has not hosted many live sessions on Zhihu, and this is the case for most Zhihu live speakers.

Zhihu Live is a paid knowledge exchange platform based on voice and text launched by Zhihu in 2016. The platform mainly relies on the industry experts accumulated by Zhihu in the past few years. Users who have purchased courses can listen to the courses or communicate with the speakers directly on the platform.

Another speaker who mainly focuses on art-related topics told the reporter that he currently updates Zhihu Live every six months to a year. The reason is that he intensively launched dozens of Zhihu Lives in 2016 and has basically "talked about all" the topics he is good at.

Shortly after Zhihu Live was launched, a record of about 100,000 participants in a single session was set by a big V, which has not been broken to this day. But it is undeniable that more and more new courses are being produced, and the traffic of a single course is gradually differentiating.

Zhao Ming, an early user of Zhihu Live and currently a graduate student, told reporters that the quality of paid content varies greatly, and the efficiency of teaching in the form of segmented voice is not high. Therefore, after purchasing a few Zhihu Live products as a trial in the early stage, he rarely purchased related products.

"Compared with free content, paid content has higher requirements for solving a certain problem, so as to arouse users' willingness to pay. But at present, most courses are still discussing a certain topic," said Zhao Ming.

In the long run, the driving force behind the value of paid knowledge comes from the scarcity of systematic knowledge acquisition by users in the fragmented era. At present, the relationship between paid knowledge platforms and speakers can be roughly divided into two categories: strong and weak. One category is represented by Get and Xiaojiang, where the platform participation is extremely high, and the matters involved include column positioning, content planning, etc., while the other category has a weaker participation, such as Zhihu Live and the previous Fenda, where the platform provides guidance, but the content is basically determined by the speaker himself.

Reduced revenue

A significant problem with knowledge payment platforms is the scarcity of internet celebrities. "Big IPs can obviously bring in traffic, but they are unstable," the above-mentioned Zhihu person told the reporter.

Despite this, many knowledge payment platforms are still trying to invite an internet celebrity who brings his own traffic. For example,蜻蜓FM invited Gao Xiaosong to the platform, Himalaya invited Ma Dong, and Luo Zhenyu, the founder of "得", has already established his own brand.

It should be pointed out that the traffic effect of "Internet celebrities" is obvious and has an advertising effect, but it cannot support the long-term development of the platform. Many of the aforementioned platforms have called on a number of celebrity resources to attract traffic, but the reporter learned that although this type of paid content itself has good sales, the conversion rate of converting traffic into purchases of other content is obviously low.

This logic is not only reflected in knowledge payment platforms, but also in general live broadcast platforms. A person in charge of Huajiao Live once told reporters in an interview that inviting celebrities can quickly increase the traffic of the live broadcast platform, but it will quickly fall back. Knowledge payment platforms are also aware of the importance of the "bottom" of the speaker pyramid, but the cultivation of this professional group takes a long time.

At the same time, Apple's enhanced review of in-app payment methods has also become a contributing factor to the decline in knowledge payment.

Reporters learned that when Zhihu Live was first launched, it still supported WeChat payment to purchase paid content, but after more than half a year, Apple strengthened its management of bypassing Apple's in-app payment at the beginning of this year. When Apple showed its attitude towards bypassing IAP (in-App Purchase), a number of platforms including Zhihu quickly compromised. At the same time, the platform ended the free model and implemented a commission on creators.

Currently on the Zhihu platform, whether it is Zhihu Live or Zhihu, you need to recharge "Zhihu Coins" to purchase, and Zhihu Coins can only be paid through Apple's official channels. During the recharge process, Apple will first take 30%. Simply put, for a Zhihu Live with 2,000 participants and a price of 20 yuan, the speaker's profit has dropped from 40,000 yuan to 28,000 yuan, and this does not include the 10% fee collected by the Zhihu platform.

Furthermore, for speakers whose prices are below 20 yuan and whose attendance reaches only a few hundred people, the revenue earned from a live event is even lower.

It is worth mentioning that the platform’s bonus period is gradually coming to an end. In the early days, there were few Zhihu Lives, and a large number of users flocked to a small number of sessions, so the speakers made a lot of money. However, as the number of Zhihu Lives increased, the revenue from a single Zhihu Live was decreasing.

It is reported that WeChat is also planning a paid reading plan, but it has not yet been launched. According to Apple's current review rules, even if WeChat launches the plan, it means that creators will need to share 30% of their income with Apple. This does not include the fees that the platform may charge.

Some industry insiders described last year’s paid knowledge market as a “market where (platforms and speakers) just make a quick buck.” The reason is that the knowledge reserves of professionals in vertical fields are limited, and the knowledge sharing of a single person cannot be sustained. Therefore, taking advantage of the craze of the paid knowledge concept last year, some new platforms did not actually operate their products after attracting a group of users or obtaining institutional investment.

Slow Progress

Despite many problems, content remains the lifeline of paid knowledge platforms.

For platforms like Zhihu, they still need to create and cultivate top content creators, the so-called platform "big Vs", but the ultimate form of the platform should be a pyramid shape: that is, it is mainly composed of creators who are not highly famous but have profound insights in vertical professional fields.

In this case, the above-mentioned Hongdou Live person told the reporter that Hongdou Live will focus on a vertical field, and the company finally chose the field of adult vocational education, such as IELTS voice paid courses, which turned out to be selling well. "In comparison, it is hard to imagine that a hobby-based, popular course can be sold at a price of 3,000 yuan." The above-mentioned person told the reporter.

Whether on Get or Zhihu Live, the "knowledge payment" courses that sell well are often those that help consumers manage their finances or even those that focus on success. Their sales are often better than niche topics such as literature.

At the same time, knowledge payment platforms are becoming more refined in their positioning. Wu Yunfei, assistant to Fenda CEO, told reporters that compared with platforms such as "Dedao" that are more inclined towards white-collar workers and the middle class, the content of platforms such as Himalaya is more popular. This differentiation will help the platform to carry out more precise content operations in the future.

At present, many people are still optimistic about the prospects of paid knowledge, and new players continue to pour into this market - Douban has launched paid audio programs, and NetEase Cloud Music has also invited industry "Internet celebrities" to launch paid content; even some vertical information platforms have launched paid Q&A within the platform.

Wu Yunfei, assistant to Fenda CEO, told reporters that the company's paid knowledge platform "Xiaojiang" defines itself more as a fragmented learning product that replaces traditional publications. "When was the last time you finished reading a book?" Wu Yunfei said that traditional reading habits and enthusiasm are gradually dying out, and a more fragmented knowledge payment market must exist.

In the ideal state of "Xiaojiang", when the platform's SKU (category) reaches thousands, the knowledge payment platform will undergo great changes: it will become a one-stop learning solution platform that can meet the needs of users no matter what vertical field of knowledge they want to obtain.

However, there is still a long way to go for paid knowledge platforms to achieve this kind of scale benefits. At least for now, the number of new courses launched online every month is still in the single digits.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.