Wen Yanxi.
Zhihu is in a long period of pressure.
As an old product that has been online for 13 years, from a unicorn to a listed company, Zhihu has experienced far more storms and cycles than the current juniors, but Zhihu has not been in the center of the spotlight for a long time.
However, also in the real world, Zhihu is living quite well, MAU is stable and exceeds 100 million, and the penetration rate of paid subscribers exceeds 10%, which is higher than that of station B.
The root cause of the pressure, of course, is the majestic trend of short**devouring everything, and Zhihu also tried to exert his strength**, but soon found that the real problem is not in the media form, but the life and entertainment components behind it.
It's just intellectual content, which can be easy and popular, but I'm afraid it's not realistic to entertain.
Zhihu's action is that it begins to stop worrying about putting on someone else's shoes:The revenue generated by the vocational training business was 24.8 billion, this year is expected to exceed 500 million, doubling year-on-year, the typical second curve can no longer be typical, in Zhihu's financial report slowly unfolded.
This is Zhihu's new identityIn addition to a knowledge community, it is also an educational company.
Zhou Yuan, the founder of Zhihu, is a native of Guizhou.
Guizhou is the only province in China that does not have plains, and the mountains are not only an obstacle to circulation, but also a difficult thing to go out of, and it is difficult to ignore the effect of staying in such an economically underdeveloped area for a long time.
Zhou Yuan said that he is very grateful for education, because he was admitted to Chengdu University of Technology, he was able to see the world outside the mountains, and when he went to Beijing to work, he has remembered this sentence until now: Everyone's problems can be attributed to education problems. 」
And his reverberations were:People change the world, and education changes people, and if education is done well, it is equivalent to changing the world. 」
However, the birth of Zhihu this platform has little to do with education, and it is difficult to say that after reading a few hot posts in the community, a certain educational goal has been accomplished, but knowledge can indeed become a hook to hook those users who are willing and need to improve their professional skills.
Since 2019, Zhihu has begun to explore the possibility of entering the vocational education business, until 2022, Zhihu Zhixuetang was launched as Zhihu's vocational education brand, covering mainstream categories such as postgraduate entrance examinations, study abroad, and qualifications, as well as branch subjects such as operations, writing, and IT office.
It seems that the accumulation of Zhihu itself has indeed played a considerable role as a hook, with more than 20 million users receiving Zhihu's education services so far, and the optimistic growth data has made Zhihu announce today that Zhihu Zhixue Hall is officially operating independently.
This is a harvest that has been ripe for 4 years, which not only represents the acceleration of Zhihu's second business flywheel, but also once again proves the long-term nature of the knowledge market, and its ultimate delivery model can only be education.
A few days ago, a middle school in Guangzhou spent more than 40,000 yuan to purchase an intelligent interactive emotional catharsis device, which became popular on the Internet, and people found that this machine is actually a shell of Nintendo's old Wii game console, and the market is less than 1,000 yuan.
On the one hand, the scarcity of educational resources has always existed, and it is difficult to get a distribution plan that satisfies everyone, on the other hand, the information asymmetrical environment will inevitably breed various arbitrage space, and the quality of spending money and the efficiency of spending money are still very likely to be improved.
Zhihu Zhixuetang is involved in the (non-degree) vocational education industry, which also inherits this contradiction, with tens of thousands of companies competing together every year, and almost no brands and scales can be made, so that the CR3 market concentration does not exceed 10% all year round, scattered and fragmented.
Zhou Yuan said that he has visited hundreds of vocational education companies over the yearsThe biggest impression is that every link of the service is optimized space, as small as no longer using WeChat to send the list of students, to the reuse of teaching data when developing disciplines, most companies are stuck in the stage of handicraft, if every link is increased by 1%, and finally added together, it must be a huge change. 」
Because you can't see the inefficiency, you roll up your sleeves and go on your own, which is the beginning of most stories in the Internet industry.
From its own community, Zhihu has also repeatedly received signals:From the annual college entrance examination season, when young students flock to Zhihu to search for the experience of applying for volunteers, to the related topics of promotion and salary increase, they are always filled with voices eager to improve their skills.
Only by providing systematic education products can we fundamentally realize the universality of knowledge, answer questions and save emergencies, and preach and teach is to help the poor.
Liu Cixin wrote a science fiction ** that is most unlike science fiction**, more than 90% of the full text, is about the hard life of a rural teacher, until a space carrier of higher creatures, randomly selected students of this rural teacher to participate in a scientific test related to whether the earth is worth protecting, through the mouth of higher civilization, Liu Cixin said his fixed respect for human civilization:
Are you trying to tell us that a species that has no memory inheritance, communicates with each other with sound waves, and communicates at an incredible rate of 1 to 10 bits per second, can create a Class 5B civilization?! And this civilization evolved on its own without any external high-level civilization cultivation? 」
The inheritance of wisdom from generation to generation, not through genes or imitation, but through the completion of the education system, is indeed a unique ability of human beings, and learning is essentially endless-although the term of lifelong learning is now a bit bloody, but aside from emotions, this is the crux of modern society.
Zhihu has been doing things for many years, and now Zhihu Zhixue has to do the road of future career.
Different from K12 and subject training fields that are committed to winning at the starting line and affected by policies, vocational education is more like a purposeful muscle-building fitness, and Zhihu's experience of building a platform to build a community makes it have a natural agglomeration effect in the customer acquisition layer, which is its greatest confidence in rectifying the vocational education industry**.
In addition to advertising and subscriptions, the necessity for young people to invest in themselves has provided a huge basic plate for the education brand of Zhihu Zhixuetang.
Just like the concept of "new professionals" created by Zhihu - 400 million Chinese in the workplace and engaged in the profession - they are generally beneficiaries of higher education, with sufficient income and consumption, and believe in the rewards of improving posture levels, they will be the main payers of Zhihu Zhixue.
A blogger once coined the term gap day, which was based on the word gap yearIt refers to the plan for young people to spare a year between completing school or two jobs to experience life, and the reason why it has shrunk into a gap day full of self-deprecating attributes is because Chinese do not have the capital to squander leisure on a year-by-year basis.
In fact, the entire East Asian society has a life outlook that is forced to follow the step-by-step process, and at each age group must do exactly what should be done at that age, and then let the next generation repeat this process, and the error tolerance rate is infinitely close to zero.
However, the meaning of education should not be like this, it does not have to scoff at the reasonable and correct, but it does not have to deal with all the challenges in the way of brushing questions, Zhihu is one of the first Chinese Internet companies to launch its own large model, the core reason is that AI can expand the ability to learn.
Just like Perplexity, the hot AI search engine, was recently discovered to be using GPT-35 – not even the most commonly used GPT-4 – plus 7B miniature models have sprung up one after another, as it turns outThe ability to fine-tune can make very good services, and the top wisdom is encapsulated into products and handed over to ordinary people to get what they want, and it is no longer a fantasy.
Zhihu wants to universalize knowledge resources, take the community as the body, and AI as the wings, until it is a self-contained education brand, and now may be the best time.
Zhihu's biggest opportunity to do education lies in the fact that in the past ten years, it has really handed over the stage to a group of people whose fate has been changed by knowledge, and the better the professional skills, the more open the road of life.
As the old saying goes, AI probably can't replace you, but people who will use AI will most likely replace you.
In Zhou Yuan's view, community and education are two sides of the same coin, the former allows people to discover a larger world through discussion, and the latter helps them to realize the path to the ideal world.
But Zhihu should not just be an ordinary education platform, the community is to education, and education is to the community, in addition to complementarity, it can also resonate, whether it is educational resources are distributed into community content, or the community discussion model is developed into educational services, Zhihu's public genes will also be inherited in Zhihu Zhixuetang.
The Internet platform does this, breaking through the physical limitations, allowing people from all over the world to get together, the learning experience should not be just one more screen, people change the world, education changes people, and one step further, technology changes education.
Just like the philosopher Carl Jaspers of the University of Heidelberg imagined the future half a century ago: true education is to shake another tree with one tree, to push another with one cloud, and to awaken another soul with one soul. 」