Zhihu promotion expenses?

Edit | Zhao Yuan

After listing, Zhihu is constantly changing.

/kloc-On the evening of August, 2006, Zhihu released its second financial report after listing. The indicators being improved are monthly activity and total income. For example, in the second quarter, the number of monthly households (MAU) reached 94.3 million, up 46.2% year-on-year, and the average monthly paid members reached 4.7 million, up 12 1. 1.

There are still some indicators that are getting worse. For example, the net loss in the second quarter was 32 1. 1 100 million yuan, and the loss in the first half of the year exceeded that in the whole year of last year, and there is still no dawn of profit. In addition, in the first half of this year, the monthly payment of members decreased by 4.6% compared with 2020 and by 65,438+05.5% compared with 2065,438+09.

Price-sensitive users are occupying Zhihu, which means that when Zhihu completes large-scale operation and raises prices to improve profits in the next step, the loss of users caused by price increases will be a huge problem.

Before and after listing, Zhihu followed the early Internet games that burned money for scale. In order to find the second growth point, it has made efforts in the direction of good product recommendation, video and live broadcast, but there are relatively mature unicorns on each track, which is a high wall in front of Zhihu.

How big is the advertising revenue space of 0 1?

"In the Internet information ocean full of garbage, truly valuable information is absolutely scarce, and high-quality information with systematic and organized knowledge still exists in individual brains, far from being effectively tapped and utilized. Zhihu provides a tool for generating, sharing and disseminating knowledge, "Kelly Y Zhou, the founder of Zhihu, once said.

Zhihu, with such initial intention, successfully attracted many bosses and elites from various industries such as Kai-Fu Lee, Zhang Xiaolong, Xu Xiaoping and Wang Xiaochuan, and provided quite high-quality content, small but refined.

Two years later, on 20 13, Zhihu developed into one of the largest comprehensive online content communities in China by opening its registration to the public. The accumulated users also have the characteristics of high education, high income and high consumption.

Once Zhihu, no matter the excitement outside the window, let him win every battle, Internet finance, O2O, I will keep the content community clean and pure.

At that time, Zhihu was also the darling of capital. Round after round of financing has brought Zhihu to a crossroads. Holding high-quality traffic, but not making good use of it, anyone who looks at it feels wasted. As a result, the balance between content community and commercialization has tilted, and commercialization is Zhihu's answer.

In 20 16, Zhihu began to provide online advertising, paid content was launched in 20 18, and salt-selected members were launched in the first half of 20 19, and the road to commercialization became wider and wider.

Accordingly, the user experience is getting worse and worse. One of the important reasons is that there are too many advertisements.

On August 16, the market value list tested 400 messages and had 53 advertising spots in the non-member state. The overall calculated advertising load (advertising loading rate) is 13.25%, which is still a little far from the upper limit of the advertising load of media news attributes (generally considered as 15%).

The distribution of these 53 advertising spots is sparse first and then dense. Before 100, there is still an advertising space every 10, and after 10, there is an advertising space every six months, so from the reading experience, it can be said that there is no room for increasing advertising space.

In the membership status, the first 100 also has 1 1 advertisements.

From the data point of view, hard and wide are indeed weak. In Q2 this year, Zhihu's online advertising revenue was 248 million yuan, with a year-on-year growth rate of 48.4%, which was much lower than the overall revenue growth rate of 65,438+044% of the Group, and its proportion further dropped to 38.9%.

What's the difference between Zhihu and Baidu?

In 2020, Zhihu launched a content commerce solution, which was mainly realized by the content marketing tool "Zhihu Plus". For example, Zhihu can find suitable creators for enterprises that need to promote brands or products, and the content created by Zhihu will be accurately distributed to users. In this kind of information, Zhihu can also provide commodity links.

For Zhihu, this marketing method is more advanced and efficient, and of course the gross profit margin is higher; For advertising companies, more impulsive consumer orders can be harvested; But for users, this method is more secret and needs a pair of discerning eyes.

Because when it is oriented to selling goods, the popular science of popular science articles is the easiest to deteriorate, perhaps only telling part of the truth, perhaps specious. Some seemingly patient and meticulous evaluation or component analysis is not necessarily a good recommendation, but may just be an advertisement.

Quality creators are scarce resources. Coupled with the storm that the creators left Zhihu before, in order to increase the scale of users, Zhihu almost removed the threshold of content, and both content providers and users gave up the original brand tonality.

Hard and soft need to be distinguished, the proportion of high-quality content is low, the content tends to be entertaining, colorful and cleverly praised, but hard-core long articles may not get high attention. Zhihu is now bidding farewell to the Zhihu of the past.

02 user's sinking AB surface

Compared with previous complacency, Zhihu is more "concerned about the world" and has more media. From words and pictures to videos, live broadcasts, and e-commerce, the content is "both quantum entanglement and daily necessities; There are both sentimentality and going abroad to study; There are poems and distant places, as well as working to make money. "

After this operation, Zhihu betrayed the original Zhihu, but gained traffic, and the process of commercialization took a step forward.

First of all, thanks to the positioning of elites and minorities, Zhihu's monthly life is not high, and it will not face the traffic peak of Taobao, WeChat and other apps. Due to the low base, the growth rate of MAU in Zhihu is good, with a year-on-year increase of 33% in 2020 and a further increase of 24.6% by the end of the first half of 2002/kloc-0.

The number of members is also rising.

Increasing the number of users means increasing income. Zhihu's income growth is also gratifying. After doubling in 2020, 202 1 will continue to rise, and the income in the first half of the year will exceed 80% of last year's total. In the second quarterly report, Zhihu predicted that the revenue in the third quarter would be 8150,000-820 million yuan. According to this rhythm, this year's income easily doubled.

From the perspective of gross profit margin. Due to the strong growth momentum of rookie online business solutions, the growth in the second quarter exceeded 15 times, surpassing the income of members, becoming the second largest source of income, and the overall gross profit margin also improved.

These data look great. However, it should be pointed out that Zhihu's strategy of soliciting traffic from the sinking market is bound to affect the income brought by individual users.

Take membership income as an example. In the first half of this year, the average monthly payment of members decreased by 4.6% compared with 2020 and by 65,438+05.5% compared with 2065,438+09. If we consider the increase in the number of paid members and use the concept of average value, the decline will be even greater.

Zhihu is no longer the territory of those elites who earn millions a year, are in the United States and just got off the plane. Price-sensitive users are occupying Zhihu, which means that when Zhihu completes large-scale operation and raises prices to improve profits in the next step, the loss of users caused by price increases will be a huge problem.

The decrease in user value is also reflected in advertising revenue. In 2020, Zhihu's advertising revenue will be 843 million yuan, equivalent to every active user 12.3 yuan. According to the data of the first half of 20021,the advertising revenue of each MAU in 20021will not exceed 10.5 yuan.

The economic benefits generated by users are getting lower and lower, but the sales and marketing expenses paid for it are always high, which is an important reason why Zhihu has not achieved profitability.

In 2020, Zhihu's losses have narrowed by nearly half, but this may not be a turning point. 202 1, the loss expanded again, and the loss in the first half of the year exceeded that of last year. The short-term improvement is only due to the reduction of marketing and sales expenses in Zhihu under the specific background of the epidemic.

What is worrying is that Zhihu may stay in an unprofitable predicament for a long time.

When can I make a profit?

When Zhihu's income statement is disassembled, the gross profit margin rises steadily, while the loss intensifies, indicating that the problem lies in the cost. To be precise, it is on the sales expenses.

If we exclude the special background in 2020, on the whole, the sales cost of getting one yuan of income is decreasing, but the sales expense ratio of about 70% is still very shocking.

This "scale-for-loss" model, which continuously burns money and vigorously promotes customers, is the original gameplay of the Internet that we are familiar with. The terrible thing is that the burning of money in marketing may not stop.

This initial play takes advantage of network externalities, that is, the value of a product to a user depends on the use of other users. The more users, the higher the value, which will have a two-way siphon effect on the suppliers and demanders of content or products. Such a loss can only build a moat of scale, which is a meaningful loss.

Zhihu's current recommendation of good things is similar to the grass planting of Little Red Book, and even got the nickname "Little Blue Book", but in form, there are many words, and the other one has the impact of pictures; On the video track, Zhihu is not as addictive as Aauto Quicker and Tik Tok, and its positioning is not as clear as it is; Do your own e-commerce and choose the best products. Opponents are Netease YEATION and Xiaomi Youpin; The live broadcast is a sea of blood; Online education can be expected, but it is far from forming a scale.

Every track Zhihu enters has strong competitors in front of him, and users have labeled them, which leads to Zhihu's continuous efforts to snatch users, so as to reverse the fixed demand of users for Zhihu.

It can be said that in the competition with peers in every segment, Zhihu has no first-Mover advantage, and the user scale cannot match. Therefore, it is not a simple matter to cultivate users' behavior and grab food from opponents' mouths, so it is almost inevitable that sales expenses will be difficult to fall.

Pinduoduo is the most successful person who snatched a piece of territory from his opponent by smashing marketing. Pinduoduo can win, first, aim at the sinking market and adopt differentiated competition; Second, by doing an e-commerce track, it is focused enough.

Zhihu, on the other hand, has a comprehensive layout, and all forms of fire are used, which is quite a bit of a "black cat and white cat", laying a hidden danger for improving the quality of profits in the future.

Looking at differentiated competition, Zhihu's advantage lies in having high-quality creators, but under the current business strategy, this advantage may be lost.

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