Zhihu “Abandoned” by the Times
Summary
The article analyzes Zhihu's declining user engagement and falling revenues after peaking in 2023, noting that all three core monetization streams (subscriptions, advertising, and marketing services) entered negative growth. It argues Zhihu’s community and commercial tensions — high-quality, deliberative content versus advertising and low-bar content — have eroded user trust and creator incentives. The piece examines Zhihu’s pivot attempts into paid content, short-form IP, vocational education and AI features, and compares strategic alternatives to Quora’s model and Reddit’s data monetization. It concludes Zhihu must protect and monetize its high-quality Chinese knowledge corpus to remain relevant in an AI era where large models can replace search and answers.