3. Strengths
• Branding: unique value position in the Chinese market (high quality Q&A
online community)
• High-quality and diverse UGC comparing to other forums.
• Easy to use with mature social networking mechanism
• Huge and loyal user base (Zhihu has 17 million registered users by March, 2015,
the average numbers of monthly unique visitors of Zhihu is over 1 billion. )
4. Weaknesses
• Its rating system is not so reasonable (funny, valueless answers may
receive more “likes” than the academic but boring ones, the answer ranked
the highest might not be the most valuable answer. )
• Copyright of UGC cannot be protected properly
5. Opportunities
• The largest Q&A online community in China, monopolized the market.
• Social atmosphere encouraged the adoption of Zhihu, people’s needs for
high quality content is increasing.
• Users are gradually developing the awareness of paying for intellectual
properties.
• People have the need of self-expression. (people are more willing to
generate content online)
6. Threats
• Other social media are coping Zhihu’s content (laws protecting intellectual
properties are vulnerable, which causes problems like Zhihu’s content being copied by
other platforms. )
• Competitors: paying-for-asking websites/apps like Fenda (分答) may take a
part of users away.
• More and more internet companies are entering the “content
commoditization” segment. (尝试“内容变现”,如微信公众号付费订阅功能)
8. Porter’s Five Forces
• Buyers: users, buyers’ bargaining power is high. (Zhihu is a user-centered
product.)
• Suppliers: users. (Zhihu relies heavily on these user generated content,
thus, content providers have high bargaining power.)
• Substitutes: other search engines, threats of substitutes is low
9. Porter’s Five Forces
• New entrants: threat of new entrants is high (people began to
understand that content brings traffic, more and more companies are
trying to commoditize the content. )
• Existing rivals: paying-for-asking apps, competition from existing rivals is
low. (There are very few competitors in the market and customers loyalty is high.)
11. Key Partners
Key opinion
leaders/professi
onals//users/soc
ial media
platforms/invest
ors
Key Activities
Encouraging/ma
naging user
generated
content. Host
zhihu-live
Key Resources
Millions of
users
Value
proposition:
High quality
question-answer
online community
and knowledge
sharing platform.
Customer
Relationship:
Customer
Segments:
Channels:
Cost structure: Revenue Stream:
• IT
• Infrastructure development
• Operational Cost
Advertisement and “paying for intellectual
properties” (知识付费,如知乎Live)
• Zhihu App
• Zhihu Website
• Other social
media
Users are both the
content providers
and the receivers.
Highly educated
people in tier 1
and 2 cities
(mainly are white
collars, student, IT
workers. )
13. Irrelevant
and Low
quality
content
Complexity
of use
High quality
answers
High quality
of users
Personalized
service
Social
networking
features
Professional
Knowledge
sharing
seminar
Baidu Zhidao (百度知道) Zhihu (知乎)
Eliminate Reduce Raise Create
High
Low
OfferingLevel