Zhihu.com was one of my favorite websites once, because of her high quality content. In the early of her growing, many excellent writers had been contributing many quality content. They shared their knowledge and opinions to receive respect and praises. During this period, if you want to register an account; you must be invented by someone who has prestige in Zhihu. It limited the number of the users and made the community to be niche and elite. Actually It’s good for content made, but why the elite group was contributing free and high quality content continuously? If Zhihu still has limited the number of users, how do they make money to revolve the community?
Free launch has never existed, although the cost of publishing content on the Internet is cheaper than other distributions. The authors and Zhihu need revenge, but the users need free and high quality content; it conflicts with each other. It seems like that zhihu has two ways to make money: Payment for high quality content and advertisement, both of them applied by Zhihu.
For advertisement, they invited many brands to join Zhihu so that they can spread their product through answer articles and made the advertisement show in the side. Users may see the advertisement on the side or mixed in contents while they are reading. Mixed advertisement into content is infamous on the Internet, but there is no such power to supervise it in a law way. You would not be able to know either is useful content or try to sell something for you.
For the payment side, Zhihu has many products: the live, the Zhihu choices, the payment article and the magazine. Zhihu is still encouraging users to produce useful content, it has become a content platform to interchange content with money. As a consequence of selling your content, Zhihu is not a bad choice.
Being an Q&A(question and answer) website, users can receive information from discussion, not just reading. The famous Wei Zexi event bloomed in 2016. People talked about it in Zhihu and Zhihu became a media platform since 2016. Zhihu started to encourage users to discuss the news in Zhihu. They never want to be a media institution because they know it has a lot risks in China. They just obtain network traffic from discussing the hot news.
In 2019, Zhihu received 450 millions US dollars from BaiDu.com. I think this is one of the main reasons why we read the advertisements mixed into content. Zhihu has no other choices, the small and beautiful Internet firm was hard surviving in China, therefore Douban.com was a typical case. We’ve seen many small forums shut down during these two years. If Zhihu didn’t transform their business strategy and install the article-deleting machine, they would not exist now.
