With the rapid development of the Internet, in order to prevent bad information from being widely spread, the state has gradually strengthened supervision over online platforms. Under the supervision of the state, will Zhihu get out of trouble or will it get deeper and deeper into trouble?
The transformation of Zhihu from community to platform
With the social and economic development, all kinds of Internet platforms are exploring new development paths, and Zhihu, as a knowledge sharing community, is no exception. In order to realize flow realization, Zhihu has been constantly exploring on the road of commercialization.
First, expand the usage scenarios to meet the needs of larger and more segmented users. Users can solve problems through Zhihu not only by asking questions for free, but also by listening to a special discussion on Zhihu Live, or reading one or two zhihu e-books. Through the development of a variety of scenario-based functions such as Zhihu Live, Valuhu and e-book, Zhihu can meet users’ different needs of information fragmentation or structural systematization at any time.
Second, connect more organizations and institutions to form a richer network. Zhihu is a knowledge sharing platform in essence, which determines its development direction. If Zhihu wants to expand its scale and achieve better development, it needs to introduce more professionals and institutions. The expansion of the platform base, the aggregation of resources and the high quality of the content are more conducive to attracting users to pay for the content of the platform, cultivating users’ payment habits and helping the platform to achieve profits.
Third, achieve advertising revenue commensurate with the value of the platform’s media. Advertising is one of the most important cash modes of Zhihu. In terms of advertising, distribution and push are the most important. Data are used for calculation, and users’ interests are understood through algorithms. Then relevant advertising push is provided according to users’ interests to improve the advertising effect.
Fourth, the establishment of knowledge service market, so that the knowledge workers who enter the market get rich first. With the emergence of the knowledge payment trend, the role of the head content producer is becoming more and more prominent. In order to motivate the top users to continue and actively produce high-quality content, Zhihu does not hesitate to set up columns, one-on-one “clinics” and lectures for them. According to data, Zhihu Live, a platform for online users, has held 2,900 lectures with 3 million participants since its launch in November, and the average hourly salary of its speakers is 11,000 yuan.
Not a few trivia apps have tried to revolutionize, but only a handful have succeeded. The self-reform of Zhihu has realized the transformation from a high-end knowledge-based community to a knowledge-based e-commerce platform, providing a commercial development direction for such applications as knowledge-based community. However, as time went on, while commercialization brought benefits to Zhihu, it now seems to be in a trap as it began to face popularization.
It is difficult to escape the riddle of dilemma
In the new era, knowledge economy has achieved unprecedented development, which is both an unprecedented opportunity and a great challenge for Zhihu. On the one hand, Zhihu has explored the right development direction in the road of commercialization. With the rise of knowledge economy, The commercialization construction of Zhihu will be more perfect. On the other hand, the wave of knowledge economy will make the market fluctuate strongly, and zhihu will encounter more problems.
First, threats from toutiao, Fenda and other platforms have poached a number of good content creators. In the tide of knowledge payment, more and more competitors have appeared in the q&A field, and it has become common for homogeneous products to meet each other. At the beginning of 2016, Toutiao began to attack q&A and officially launched Wukong Q&A in June. The rapid development of Wukong Q&A has squeezed Zhihu’s market space and threatened its position in q&A.
However, Toutiao’s attack on q&A is not over. In 2018, Toutiao announced that it would invest 1 billion yuan in Wukong Q&A, which will be used to answer contributors in various professional fields signed by the platform and reward ordinary users with red envelopes and questions. The move is expected to attract more professionals to Wukong Q&A, who become more active on the platform in order to win bonuses. Second, It helps Wukong Answer to grab more users. At the same time, under the temptation of bonus and red envelope, it can prolong the user’s use time and improve the user retention rate of the platform.
In addition to wukong Q&A, Zhihu also has to face threats from many q&A platforms, such as Zifen. Now Zhihu is facing a situation of Wolf before tiger.
Secondly, due to the open platform content, a large number of users poured in, bringing some low-quality content. Compared with the initial niche and elite community, Zhihu, which has embarked on the road of commercialization, is now more popular. On the positive side, the scale of Zhihu users is constantly expanding; on the negative side, some low-quality content is also flooding in while bringing more fresh content to the platform. At the same time, Zhihu is quite similar to weibo and other platforms in setting. They are all heat-oriented to push, which makes some low-quality content attract attention due to users’ “usage habits” and makes high-quality content more difficult to be discovered.
At the same time, the site popular answer reflects the average user’s cognitive level, and based on the hands of everyone has decided to answer the ticket as life and death, a main cater to users had become a common phenomenon in the platform, so the problem is limited, professional some network buzzwords, roaring genre is widely used in the answer, make know it on the specialized knowledge community began to “post”, More and more users are using Zhihu as tieba, Douban and Qiusbai.com.
“Community hydration” has shaken The positioning of Zhihu as a “high-quality content community”, broken the advantageous barrier established by Zhihu in the q&A field, and brought social evaporation cooling effect. When professionals can no longer find discussion partners on the platform, they will choose to move to higher barriers, which is almost a fatal threat to Zhihu.
Third, in order to realize the realization, the platform is bound by the head user. When Zhihu transforms from a community into an e-commerce platform, one-to-many e-commerce with zero marginal cost will inevitably lead to a winner-takes-all situation among the head users. In terms of providing knowledge, it is difficult for ordinary users to continue to write high-quality long articles, and the majority of traffic is basically occupied by professionals. After occupying a large amount of traffic, these head users attempt to break away from Zhihu and create their own knowledge communities to divert zhihu users.
However, the nature of Zhihu determines that, compared with the head users, it is difficult for small and medium-sized users to have their personal brands highlighted, and the fixed interest user group has been formed. In order to retain these users, When they reap the cash, Zhihu has to help and support the “kidnapped” users.
More regulation, opportunity or swamp?
When Zhihu continues to complete its commercial construction, supervision will follow. As the Internet grows restless, it seems no surprise that Zhihu, a giant in the question-and-answer industry, has been targeted. So, will strict supervision help Zhihu to climb out of the mire or push it to sink deeper into the mire?
On the one hand, there are regulatory advantages. Strict supervision can clean up the entire network environment and solve the biggest pain points in the development and commercialization of Zhihu at the source, which is more conducive to the future construction of Zhihu platform and to promote the better development of Zhihu to a certain extent.
First, it serves as a warning to Zhihu, prompting it to better clean up the platform and improve the overall content quality of the platform, which is conducive to the future development of Zhihu and makes the industry more standardized. The openness of the network enables all kinds of information to be widely disseminated, which can be used by malicious people in the process of rapid dissemination of information. However, the insufficient information screening of the network platform leads to the widespread dissemination of bad information, which has a negative impact on the social atmosphere. In this case, the involvement of regulatory authorities has become inevitable. Under the supervision of the platform, the information content screening will be more powerful, which is conducive to the positive and healthy development of the network environment. And a good network environment will feed back to the platform, promote the development of the platform more standardized, healthy.
Second, under strict supervision, In order to realize commercialization, Zhihu will make more efforts to develop in the direction of diversification, which is conducive to the building of the content ecosystem. Strict supervision can lead to more diversified development of Zhihu. The main reason is that strict supervision limits the current development strategy of Zhihu, and the strategy of lowering the threshold to expand the scale of users is not feasible. In this case, Zhihu can only realize realization from other directions. In addition to expanding the user scale and improving the user retention rate, we should also control the content quality of the platform, improve the content ecological value of Zhihu, and promote the development of content ecological construction.
Of course, supervision also has a certain impact on Zhihu. According to estimates by People’s Daily, zhihu lost as many as two million new users and an unknown number of existing users in the seven days since it was removed. It can be seen from the data that the traffic and reputation of Zhihu have been greatly affected after the news of being regulated and removed from the shelves came out.
In general, although it is in the wave of knowledge payment, as a knowledge community, Zhihu cannot be impatient to realize commercialization. However, the strict supervision encountered on the road to realisation may bring Zhihu not a new dilemma, but also a chance to regain its vitality. After all, cleaning up the entire network environment is a good opportunity for zhihu, a platform with strong professional requirements, to build a high-quality content ecosystem.
It is clear that supervision is moving towards professionalism and timeliness, and the future Internet industry will inevitably be strongly involved by supervision. This means that the market and pattern of internet-related fields will change. In the process of adaptation and competition, new market opportunities are brewing. As an app that has solved many problems for people, we look forward to seeing Zhihu seize this opportunity and grow stronger in the future.
Article/Liu Kuang public account, ID: Liukuang110