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| Zhihu, how can it make money? |
Zhihu, a Q&A community website in mainland China, was opened in December, 2010, not long after the subject being imitated Quora being opened to general public. So far, Zhihu has got 2.5 million UV on average everyday and 60 million UV on average every month, with 6 million of them as registered users (tech.sina.com, 2014). It is quite a large user base, comparing to the 0.18 million active users of its model Quora (Anita, 2012), even taking into account the difference of population base between China and America.
However, there is one question having not
yet been answered: how can Zhihu make money?
Profits come from the core resources. Then
what core resources does Zhihu have? The short answer is: high quality content,
high quality users, and data collected about these users.
So the question becomes: what can Zhihu
make out of these core resources?
Since very similar resources are also owned
by Quora, again, we may take Quora as a model. What has Quora done?
According to several interviews of Quora’s Chief
Executive Officer Adam D'Angelo, Quora has tried a lot of methods including
providing ad services on its sub-productions like blogs, and charging for premium
functions, services or content (tech.qq.com, 2013). However, none of them has
become mature enough to ensure a promising future.
In addition to Quora, some other Q&A
community websites both in America and in China are also exploring their own
profit models. Stack Exchange, regarded as the best example in terms of earning
profits, offers recruitment services in addition to ad services by collecting
and analyzing the professional answers from the users and recommending the
wanted ones to the right companies, and therefore can get payment from those
recruiters (Huxiu.com, 2013). Another company PeerPong tried to get users to
pay for the high quality answers from authorities or experts (TechWeb.com,
2010).
A more interesting example can be found
from a science community website, Guokr.com. Depending on the professional users
it has cumulated, it on one hand, provides some technology consulting services
for business corporations and reserve parts of the service fees; on the other
hand, it collects the articles users created on its website and get them
published by its own publishing company.
All these, at least provided several
solutions to the problem of profit model of the Q&A community websites. But
to go a step further, we need to ask: are they really suitable for Zhihu?
Though ad services sound like a good choice
considering the large user base, the benefit may not outweigh the cost at least
at the current stage, because of its harm to the user experience. Then what
about native advertising? Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible. On Zhihu, the
rank of the answers is determined by the votes from every user, which means the
site administers have no privilege on choosing the best answers. Therefore, for
companies, it’s no use pay for Zhihu to put their native ads into the
community, and if they can make their native ads rank high by improving the
content, there is no need to pay for Zhihu.
As for charging the users for high quality
answers, it is still not clear to what extent Chinese users would like to pay
for digital reading. According to the report from Chinese Academy of Press And
Publication, in 2013, 38.7% of digital reading users claimed that they may
accept paying for the readings, the ratio is even lower than that of 2012,
which was 40.1%. However, 41.3% of users reported that whether or not they
would like to pay is determined by the quality of the content (China Youth
Daily, 2014). Considering that content of Zhihu has long been regarded as
highly qualified, charging users for high quality answers can be a possible
choice for Zhihu to make profits.
While deeper mining, developing and
publishing of the content and offering consulting services by collaborating
with users might be the most promising methods for Zhihu. These are also the
most relevant methods to its core resources.
In sum, to make money is important, but
user experience can never be sacrificed. Considering the high value of the UGC
and users themselves, for Zhihu, to build its profits on the high quality
content and professional capacities of users may be a wise choice in the near
future.
Reference:
知乎完成2200万美元B轮融资：软银赛富领投
Quora创始人安吉洛：不为眼前利益放弃长远计划
比Quora活得更好的问答社区：Stack Exchange
Quora等问答网站迅速窜红 硅谷热议盈利模式
国民数字阅读普及
但付费意愿更弱
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