Research On The Commercial Operation Mode Of The Internet Quiz Community Zhihu

What information products media produce,how to produce and why are the basic questions in media research.Zhihu,as the most representative question-and-answer community of the Chinese Internet,has a content volume of hundreds of millions of scale and positive network social influence.How it makes use of its own and external favorable conditions to carry out commercial operation has a directional effect on the current Internet content industry.In order to better analyze the commercial operation mode of Zhihu,this paper adopts a research paradigm combining interpretivism and logical speculation.Firstly,through literature analysis,this paper explains the concept of "commercialization" and analyzes the development process and role transformation of Zhihu in the past ten years.Secondly,in the ethnographic way,I participated in the working process of the advertising cooperation project as the project executive intern of the commercial advertising division of Zhihu.I observed the advertising cooperation project for a period of half a year,conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with several employees of the department,and collected a large number of materials related to the commercialization operation of Zhihu.Through the research and analysis of the collected materials,it can be found that Zhihu currently includes three types of content,namely professional industry and discipline knowledge,life experience content with reference significance,and users’ insightful content when hot social events occur.With the participation of creators as workers and ordinary users as consumers,as well as the influence of external Internet advertising market environment,Zhihu has the basic elements of commercialization transformation,and has gradually formed four major commercial operation modes in its business development.Brand advertising is the primary commercial operation mode of Zhihu,which produces commercial content through business collaboration and distributes it with the help of traffic tools.User payment and self-management are conventional commercial operation modes,among which the paid content of education and training is an important commercial growth channel for Zhihu,while the content e-commerce is a relatively innovative commercial operation mode.In the aspect of feature analysis,the relevant theories and critical orientation of communication political economy are more appropriate for analysis.From the perspectives of production,exchange and consumption,the content production of Zhihu is the process of producing discourse authority,and there are labor exploitation and industrial mass production.The exchange link is the exchange between symbol and abstraction,freedom and non-equivalence,and labor and demand.The characteristics of consumption are intermediary,spectacle and scene.Finally,Zhihu’s commercial operation mode has a variety of problems,which are not only reflected in the difficulty of helping users realize the value internalization of experience-based information content,but also the excessive entertainment orientation consumes the sense of publicity and trust.The coverage of commercial content also brings a kind of false group wisdom that runs counter to the original community positioning of Zhihu.Through this research,it is expected to supplement the current research content of Internet media and social related fields.