Tencent, kuaishou and baidu recently raised $430 million for zhihu.In fact, zhihu raised $270 million in a funding round last year.Its investors include Internet companies such as sogou, as well as other investors such as Goldman sachs, capital today and lee’s innovation works.Today, Domatters Digital China Marketing shares zhihu and the bureau of capital behind it with you.

In fact, there are many perspectives to share on zhihu.Such as the entrepreneurial story of zhihu, its business logic, knowledge payment, and community operation.Today let’s just talk about the strategic layout of Chinese Internet enterprises and the capital in the bureau behind them.

What-is-the-experience-of-zhihu’s-successful-financing-of-430-million-dollars

First let’s have a brief understanding of zhihu’s entrepreneurial experience.Zhou yuan is the founder of Zhihu.Zhihu’s success is mainly due to ‘Tianshi’ ‘Di li’ ‘Ren he’ in Chinese which is mean ‘the right people at the right place at the right time’.

’Tianshi’ refers to a website in the United States called Quora in 2009, which is actually a question-and-answer community in the United States.The Chinese zhihu is modeled after it, which is the Chinese version of Quora.Quora is said to be a name made up of the words’ QU ‘from the word’ Question ‘and’ Or ‘a’ from the word ‘ Or answer ‘.The site was doing well in the American Internet community, and its reputation was very good.Zhou yuan found a good imitation of the object began to do.He founded zhihu in 2010.Capital was hot in those days, unlike many words that are inconvenient today.Take the word ‘winter’ for example,which in Chinese translates as steady state.We are actually in a steady state of capital that a lot of capital is sitting on the sidelines, not investing.But at that time PPT financing capital is invested.Tianshi was when he founded zhihu borrowed from Quora, and the capital was active at that time.’Di li’ is the local VC was emerging at that time.Lee founded innovation works which was also looking for cases to invest.And the American model was brought to China was very much accepted by chinese at that time.At that time, the main model was to copy the American model to China, which felt very reliable.’Ren he’ refers to lee’s charisma is very big at that time who is the idol of all college students.After he invested in zhihu, kai-fu lee not only went to zhihu to answer questions, but also called many big VIP to zhihu with his charisma, which established the earliest big VIP in zhihu.

Zhihu has not grown particularly fast.But one of the advantages of being a content community is that it is a value sink.For example, this special offer what is worth buying will expire after a few days, and the value of this thing will not settle down.Zhihu is valuable in the long run.Therefore, although zhihu is slow, its value is getting bigger and bigger, and the company is getting better and better.Of course, there are also many problems on zhihu. For example, there are more people pretend to be drunbility on zhihu, “people was in the United States, just got off the plane”.It has also experienced several big V departures and the distribution of benefits has been uneven.There are a lot of problems with community operations.Zhihu is indeed the best knowledge community in China.Because zhihu always has such an atmosphere of respecting professionalism and rational discussion.Zhihu is highly recognized by the public. It plays an extraordinary role in educating the public.

Let’s take a look at the companies in the bureau.

Let’s start with baidu.Now is an era that the information find people and information surplus.The value of everybody most core also is from search to stroll in the internet.Why did baidu fail and there are no ‘B’ only ‘AT ‘ in Chinese giants in the future?This is the most fundamental logical reason.What’s going on with baidu and zhihu?Baidu is also a former zhihu competitor.Baidu blocked search results on zhihu in 2018, when it started pushing Baijiahao.Baidu later did baidu baike.Zhihu has always been a question-and-answer community.Once they were rivals, now they are Allies.Because there are only eternal interests and no eternal enemies.Today’s toutiao also began to do search, baidu is very nervous and hurry up to want to buy zhihu.Because zhihu stocks rich and high-quality content.In this way, baidu can receive good content, which may not be provided to headline search, in order to maintain baidu’s competitive advantage.In addition, baidu had a lot of negative news before, such as the case of Wei jersey,which was also fermented on zhihu at the beginning.Domatters estimated that we would not see many negative news about baidu in zhihu.This is also good for baidu in terms of PR.

Then let’s talk about fast short video.Kuaishou and douyin are competitive, but their competition is a relatively benign one.Both sides can be said to be doing more and more in the competition, or even can be said to be the beneficiaries of competition.Because they’re all kind of bottom line competition.They are both relative gentlemen, and a positive case of competition.Douyin is becoming bigger and bigger this year. Kuaishou also wants to achieve the goal of 300 million yuan per day.But the crowd of fast short videos is saturated now.Because fast hand it is to do a sinking market.Basically the sinking market has little potential.

It will be hard for kuaishou to raise the number of daily lives much more if it sinks.So now it must  move into first – and second-tier cities and southern markets.This is the most fundamental logic of kuaishou.It is said that the temperament of kuaishou is not suitable for investment on zhihu.Its temperament and zhihu completely do not go together.But why bother?Because of this fundamental logic.If it wants to get users up and running, it has to go into more mainstream markets.And kuaishou expand and layout to different circles that can spread the risk.Therefore, whether kuaishou invests in A station or zhihu are all such the same logic.

Sogou itself has not a very strong presence.But behind sogou is tencent.Tencent WeChat content is not open to baidu, but open to sogou.Sogou has been able to search tencent content.Now toutiao is the same big enemy of the current  for baidu and tencent .They’re all ganging up on Headline.Sogou also does not have choice leeway, because sogou and baidu also are competitor originally.But sogou can’t unite with toutiao, because it’s tencent’s war capital and it is toutiao’s natural enemy.

There are several questions of zhihu.The first one is slower.Of course, slow is also valuable.The current pace of the Internet is all very fast.Today’s Internet in China can no longer give a company eight years to do the content, only zhihu is possible.So zhihu is a very unique value in the Internet industry in China.The second problem is that zhihu is not very profitable. Zhihu has tried knowledge payment before.The market for paid knowledge is small, and users are narrow.And there are problems with the rate of repeat purchases.People buy products that pay for knowledge, and after buying them twice, they will not buy them again if they find that there is no sense.Zhihu has also done some short video and so on mess, but it has not done well and does not make money.Zhihu has many other problems.This includes issues of community governance, as well as headlines did wukong q&a in 2017, numerous big V departures and so on.In this context, zhihu also needs money and traffic.In fact, more than 70% of the traffic on zhihu comes from baidu during its fastest growth years.So it is a good thing for zhihu that baidu can invest in it.

Why don’t toutiao buy zhihu? Because the headline already has a similar product which is Wukong q&a in 2017 to zhihu.It signed a lot of big V’s to dig zhihu.And it pays big vs directly to demand that these big vs can’t send content to zhihu any more.It is already a competitor of zhihu, and it will repeat itself if you buy it.For headlines, it can be bought or not.If it’s too expensive, it won’t want to buy it.For fast short video, Kuaishou wants to buy very much.Because it’s going to go into the market that we talked about above.For baidu it must be bought.So these three have different prices in mind.The final price also makes baidu and kuaishou extremely expensive.So the headline didn’t buy it.This has formed an anti-headline coalition.We can see tencent, baidu, sogou, kuaishou, zhihu are all in it, and even more people will join in the future.