Why Kuaishou leads inverst in Zhihu?

On August 12, Zhihu officially announced the completion of F round of $434 million financing. This round of financing was led by Kuaishou, followed by baidu, and followed by Tencent and the original investors of today capital.

Zhihu and Kuaishou, one is the world's largest Chinese community question and answer platform, one is a national short video platform with more than 200 million daily activities. The two are in the same box, and the style seems to be very different. Why Kuaishou leads inverst in Zhihu? And why Zhihu chooses Kuaishou? What prompted them to come together?

Zhou yuan, founder and CEO of Zhihu, once said that looking for investment is not looking for money, but for teammates. For Zhihu, financing is more like a process of finding partners. Since 2019, Zhihu's user and content scale has continued to grow. Although the road to commercialization is not smooth, Zhihu is not so short of money, for Zhou yuan, whose money is the key. In August last year, when Zhihu completed the e-round of financing, Zhou yuan said in an internal letter, "After the financing, Zhihu will accelerate the construction of a nationwide knowledge content platform, build a new ai-driven community, and make knowledge benefit everyone."

Among them, "AI" and "pratt & Whitney" became the key words of Zhihu's e-round financing. AI aims to transform Zhihu into an intelligent community from a "human-governed" community. Pratt & Whitney, on the other hand, hopes to transform Zhihu from a knowledge-sharing community to a mass content platform. Kuaishou's "AI" and "pratt & Whitney" are in the same direction as Zhihu's strategic layout. Kuaishou can bring Zhihu, not only money, but also to help it achieve strategic transformation. The first is AI technology. As a platform with massive short video, Kuaishou algorithm recommendation technology has been very mature and far ahead. In the case of station A, Kuaishou's AI technology has been tested.

In July, station A just released A new version, not only its UI has been changed, but also the bottom layer is connected to Kuaishou's technology and AI recommendation algorithm. After the transformation of the Kuaishou team, the entire technical framework of station A was completely transformed, and Kuaishou's AI technical ability was proved to be more capable of transferring to partners. For Zhihu, traditionally, its community relies on the social graph of each questioner to invite questions and answers. If it can make use of the fast AI, it can also achieve intelligent steps in terms of content production, content quality, community atmosphere and information recommendation.

The second is the expansion of user circles. By January 2019, Zhihu had more than 220 million users and more than 130 million answers. With the expansion of user scale, great changes have taken place in the user structure of Zhihu. A large number of users in second - and third-tier cities discuss, share and communicate on Zhihu. Zhihu has seen such an obvious trend and direction, but it has not found a better way to expand more efficiently. Kuaishou, as a short video community, can reach almost every level of China. With the support of Kuaishou, Zhihu will benefit a lot from the expansion of users in the second and third-tier cities.In addition to the above two points, Zhihu has been trying to enter the new media form of short video. Short video can not only enrich its content form, but also further reduce the threshold of content creation and consumption.

However, Zhihu has not found a good method in the short term, so it has to give up the strategy. There are more than 15 million short video uploads on Kuaishou every day, some of which are of high quality video content. At present, kuaihand's original handwork users, such as geng and Dr. Dai's lab, have received good attention on Zhihu. The content of Kuaishou is a good complement to Zhihu short video. For Kuaishou, if we say that the wholly-owned acquisition of A station, it is to enter the bureau of the second yuan. So investing in Zhihu is a measure to enrich its content ecology. On July 23, Kuaishou held its first photosynthesis conference for its creators. At the conference, Kuaishou announced the launch of the photosynthesis program, opening up 10 billion yuan of traffic to support 100,000 content creators, and plans to add 3,000 million fans this year, covering more than 20 vertical categories.

After reaching 200 million days, Kuaishou, which focuses on UGC content, hopes to further enhance the content ecology. Both are content-centered communities, and Zhihu and Kuaishou are complementary in content and circle. The operation of Zhihu in Internet, astronomy, medicine, biology, law, economics and other vertical categories has been relatively mature and formed a moat. The two have a very large cooperation space in vertical operators. Zhihu has been infiltrating in the knowledge circle for many years. Investment in Zhihu will help Kuaishou increase its penetration in the higher knowledge circle.

In addition to interesting content, Kuaishou also has a lot of "useful" content that people are willing to pay for. "Kuaishou classroom" was launched in June 2018, and by July, the total number of paying users had exceeded 10,000. Zhihu's high-quality knowledge and general science content are also helpful to the ecological construction of Kuaishou's content in the field of knowledge. Zhihu and Kuaishou were both founded in 2011. Although they are in different fields, their paths of development are somewhat similar. Zhihu is a community to share knowledge, while Kuaishou is a community to record life. Although Kuaishou and Zhihu are communities with completely different cultural atmosphere, compared with other content platforms, they are both "down-to-earth".

Zhihu is composed of people who share their strengths. Make up of fast hand, is a share their own life. Zhihu and Kuaishou have maintained the same restraint on commercialization. Slow company Zhihu only announced its full commercialization in 2017. In the process of commercialization, Zhihu seems to be "timid". And the fast hand that holds water 8 years, fast hand also did not advance commercialization quickly. It was not until the end of last year that Kuaishou officially launched its commercialization. At that time, fast hand information flow advertising public test has been in the past 2 years.

To sum up, the three most urgent needs of Zhihu are technology, more universal users and short video content. Kuaishou can provide Zhihu with all these needs. From the perspective of Kuaishou, Zhihu's high-quality content and high knowledge circle will be the best complement of Kuaishou at present. On this basis, it is hardly surprising that two Internet companies, which have also exercised restraint, should come together.