In other words, "member" is no longer equivalent to "discount+points+stored value" that the public used to think. At present, membership system can be said to be both an attitude of enterprises and an emotional expression of customers.
From the differentiated broadcasting of video platform members, to the paid copyright of music platform members, and then to the social and knowledge payment, countless products have embarked on the road of more intensive membership, including Zhihu, which is trying to further tap the user value.
Zhihu members in the historical process.
Compared with the rapid expansion of user scale, Zhihu, which has only obtained advertising and a small amount of copyright benefits for a long time, has been conservative on the road of commercialization. 20 13 In March, Zhihu, which was established more than two years ago, was registered by invitation to the public. In less than a year, its registered users quickly climbed from 400,000 to 4 million.
20 16 is the stage when content payment becomes a new trend. The paid voice question-and-answer platform "answer" allows many celebrities and experts in various fields to answer questions for users. After the success of logical thinking, Luo Zhenyu, the representative of knowledge payment, began to make every effort to create a "get APP" to allow users to acquire knowledge efficiently in fragmented time; Himalayan FM founded the Knowledge Payment Festival, and Douban launched Douban Time, which included many courses such as poetry, literature and psychology. ...
Zhihu, as a content platform, naturally has such natural advantages, and has also started the road of commercialization-knowing the unlimited plan of Live.
"Know Live Unlimited Plan Card" will provide users with annual membership service, during which users can spend unlimited 1000 selected lives in Zhihu. Kelly Y Zhou, founder and CEO of Zhihu, made it clear that this would be the performance of paying for knowledge in Zhihu.
Know that life has unlimited plans
Zhihu succeeded in his first attempt.
According to the data one year later, since Live was launched 1 1 month ago, there have been 2,900 performances, with the average hourly salary of speakers exceeding 1 1000 yuan and the number of participants exceeding 3 million. More importantly, the repurchase rate of its users reached 43%.
The high repurchase rate shows that users' recognition of the quality of paid content in Zhihu is the support of the underlying technology, which makes these contents reach users accurately and get recognition. Zhihu has strengthened the recruitment and training of algorithmic talents such as machine learning and interest engine, and realized the recommendation mechanism of thousands of people.
In 20 18, Zhihu began the second round of business model exploration. In April, Zhihu launched the audio paid product "Zhihu Reading Club" for the first time, and began to sell the annual card members of the reading club to encourage users to cultivate reading habits through the innovative content form of "celebrity reading".
Subsequently, Zhihu officially upgraded its "knowledge market" business to "Zhihu University". The product system consists of three parts: classroom+books+training camp, which realizes the integration from text to audio and video to online courses. At the same time, Zhihu's "svip" has been put on sale, so that buyers can enjoy the above services in one stop and get other rights and interests at the same time.
The road to commercialization in Zhihu seems to be smooth sailing, but at that time, some problems began to appear.
Because knowledge payment has just been accepted by the public, and Zhihu has changed from a "free knowledge sharing community" to a "payment platform" too fast, some users have begun to feel uncomfortable with the changes in Zhihu. In addition to the mixed comments on the content, many users are also beginning to feel dissatisfied with the advertisements in the application.
"salt elected members"
In fact, there are many reasons why users are dissatisfied with knowledge payment.
On the one hand, rapid learning in a fragmented environment will inevitably have some utilitarianism that is eager to achieve success. Under the "placebo effect", users are caught in a contradictory cycle of alternating sense of accomplishment and anxiety, so they will also be dissatisfied with the current situation of the product.
On the other hand, everyone's demand for knowledge is different, including not only differences in fields, industries and disciplines, but also differences in knowledge depth. This means that the knowledge payment platform needs to explore which content can be included in the membership service and which content should be discarded in the early stage, which is also a common challenge faced by the platform.
At present, the knowledge payment market has entered a more calm and mature stage after experiencing the upsurge, and it is obviously not an easy task for all platforms to successfully complete the commercialization layout. At the same time, the continuous emergence of different types of knowledge payment platforms makes knowledge payment a buyer's market, and users have greater choices, which makes it more difficult for platforms to gather users.
Therefore, in order to cope with the difficulties and challenges of the escalating market, Zhihu recently started a new round of adjustment of the membership service system, and renamed the business division of Zhihu University as the Zhihu Member Division, further clarifying the status of membership business as the company's strategic development goal.
On March 18, Zhihu officially announced the launch of a brand-new "Salt Elected Member" membership service system, with the core concept of "YEATION books, courses and contents, so that knowledge can empower everyone". In the words of CEO Kelly Y Zhou, it is "making it easy for people to get reliable answers, and this matter is the North Star of Team Zhihu". It guides our current work: wireless city, tool scenario and business matrix. "
Previously, Zhihu's "svip" and "Reading Club Members" were both introduced by Zhihu University, but this membership service system was introduced by Zhihu. Therefore, this "Salt Elected Member" has upgraded its content and user service around the whole platform of Zhihu, and its core covers three dimensions-paid content, identity rights and community functions.
Zhang Zeng, vice president of Zhihu and head of the member business department, once said a phenomenon: "At present, there is a widespread problem of information flooding and overload in the user information environment, and the truly valuable content is submerged by a large number of low-quality junk information, which has not benefited from effective dissemination and value matching. "
Zhihu's paid content upgrade is just to solve this problem.
On the basis of Zhihu University's original one-stop knowledge service, Zhihu has added more contents to meet the knowledge needs of different groups of people, including domestic first-line magazines such as VOGUE, Focus and Beijing Youth Weekly, private salt courses and live lectures for individual systematic study, and more than 600 e-books and contents read by more than 600 experts.
Secondly, it is necessary to design some incentives for the growth of members. In addition to direct benefits such as discounts and concessions, spiritual drive is equally important in the incentive measures, which is reflected in the upgrading of the identity rights of Zhihu members.
On the basis of the original membership rights and interests, Zhihu has added exclusive members' expressions and card pendants, as well as exclusive customer service functions to solve users' questions in time. These functions will give users a sense of belonging and accomplishment, and then enhance the user's activity on the platform.
In addition, the core of member economy is a social demand.
A sense of belonging, a connection with each other, and becoming an opinion leader among a group of people all need to be realized in the community. If a platform is a community, then membership is an added threshold in this community, which brings some people together in a smaller space. This small space will not only strengthen the sense of belonging of internal members, but more importantly, it will be very attractive to ordinary users who want to gain recognition outside the threshold.
Therefore, Zhihu has also upgraded the rights and interests of community functions this time. In the past, membership services focused more on paid content, but this time, Zhihu has added more rights and interests in community functions, such as exclusive functions such as keyword screening on the home page and comment area mapping, which will obviously enhance users' browsing and discussion experience in daily use in Zhihu and be more attractive to users.
By the end of 20 19, there were more than 220 million users in Zhihu, most of whom were young people aged 18-35 who were pursuing self-improvement. This is very different from users of video platforms or e-commerce websites. Because of this, the salt election members in Zhihu will become an important way for most users to get reliable answers.
CEO Kelly Y Zhou also said, "Members should be the second scene of content consumption in Zhihu, and should be more deeply integrated with community content. We hope to build Zhihu's salt-selected membership service into a selection of high-quality paid content in the whole network, and further integrate with community platforms to further enrich and improve Zhihu's business model. "
Competing for users with free services is a common business model in the industry, but this is only a strategy applicable in the early stage, and it is by no means a long-term solution.
In the current information surplus environment, emerging new consumers have the ability to pay for self-improvement, but they are only willing to pay for content that is valuable to them. Understanding users and identifying users' needs, not just doing product business, is the requirement of every Internet product at present, and it is also the necessary ability for its survival.
Reaching a * * * understanding with users at the content level and strengthening contact with users at the service level are the goals of promoting YEATION members in Zhihu. Zhihu said that in 20 19, Zhihu hopes to upgrade to a dual-engine drive by introducing members and optimizing services.
From this perspective, selecting members with salt is not only an important action of Zhihu, but also a new exploration of the industry.
At present, knowledge payment has entered the deep water area, and the conversion rate is gradually decreasing, which makes many platforms begin to move towards the road of "traffic first"-that is, obtaining traffic through fission and then converting it into knowledge payment. However, attracting traffic means that the platform needs to constantly increase those simple and utilitarian content, and the quality of the content purchased by users is not high and there is no loyalty to the platform.
Take the road of new traffic, or take the road of intensive cultivation of content+service? From the point of view of Zhihu, leaning towards the latter seems to be a better way to find a new direction of knowledge.