One Year In, What Is Zhihu Live Actually Worth?

It still isn't enough to carry Zhihu's revenue.

"Hourly rate" seems to be Zhihu's favorite subject at the moment.

At the end of last month Zhihu published the latest numbers for Live: since it launched on May 16 last year, Zhihu Live has held 2,900 sessions, each speaker talking for an average of 65 minutes, at an average hourly rate of more than 11,000 yuan.

In a Live, a speaker talks — mostly by voice — sharing what he or she knows with an audience that has paid to listen.

This is the business Zhihu most likes to discuss; it has now reported Live's earnings three times. By Zhihu's count, users have bought Lives 2.69 million times, and 1.16 million people bought more than one.

By contrast, Zhihu has never once gone into detail about its advertising revenue, and that business is nearly two years old.

But what does this money actually mean for a company six years into its life? And is what speakers earn enough to pull in more, and better, people?

We compiled data on the 2,661 Lives that had finished between the first one — "Analyzing Commercial Bank Annual Reports," on May 16 last year — and April 27, covering each session's revenue, price and attendance. (Zhihu's 2,900 includes sessions announced but not yet held.) What follows is our reading of Zhihu Live's first year.

For Zhihu this is 20 million yuan a year — not much, and falling in recent months

Over almost a year, Zhihu users paid 65.08 million yuan for Lives.

Zhihu kept none of it.

From May 1, though, Zhihu Live began taking a 30% cut from speakers. If a user pays on an iPhone, Apple takes 30% first, and Zhihu takes 30% of what is left.

Split the payments evenly between iPhone and Android, and a Live that grosses 10,000 yuan leaves Zhihu just 2,250 yuan. In practice Apple's share of spending is probably higher than half.

On that basis, had Zhihu taken its cut through Live's first year, it would have earned about 16.6 million yuan.

Over the past year Zhihu's team grew by half, from 200 people to nearly 300. Payroll alone costs more than 100 million yuan a year.

Last November was Live's best month, a peak held up by hits from Li Xiaolai, Zuoxiao Zuzhou, Daniel FC and a few others — and the discounted sales are not factored into those figures.

Leave aside February, which Chinese New Year distorted, and both total revenue and revenue per session have fallen over the past six months.

If Zhihu wants Live to become a core source of income, it needs more speakers than it has now, and it needs each of them to earn more per session.

Count the preparation, and some big names are earning three figures an hour

Zhihu's "hourly rate" is an average: 11,000 yuan for every hour of Live delivered.

That is what the audience pays. Once the cut begins, a 10,000-yuan Live leaves the speaker 5,950 yuan after Apple and Zhihu. Income tax comes out of that as well; for the bigger earners, what finally lands in hand is less than half of what listeners paid.

What pulls the hourly rate down further is preparation.

He Tao, chief writer at GQ China, has given six Lives on writing. Before each one he writes out a full word-for-word script and rehearses it again and again — about a week of work.

"Zhihu users are pickier about content than users on other platforms. They expect more of a speaker, and there's no fobbing them off," he said. "I think every Zhihu speaker knows that."

Art agent Weng Xin has given 26 Lives, grossing 144,000 yuan in all (before tax and promotions). He prices each at about 20 yuan. His biggest, "The Job of an Art Agent," drew 1,279 people; his smallest, on the Impressionists Pissarro and Sisley, still drew 111. On average he takes 5,531 yuan a session.

That is not his hourly rate, and he has never worked it out that way.

Preparing a Live usually starts with a full working day, from first idea to outline. His first Zhihu Live was called "Three Things About Art That Stump Us." "Zhihu's operations people told me to talk about whatever I liked, so I gathered up the questions I get asked most often on Zhihu and picked this one," he recalls.

That stage takes eight hours. With the outline fixed, he collects material, reads up and checks the arguments he has sketched out. "That part stretches — three to five hours at the least, twenty at the most," he said.

A Live is usually announced days or even weeks ahead. Once it is up, anyone who has bought a ticket can post questions or comments on its page.

Like most speakers, Weng Xin spends the first half of a session on his prepared outline and the second half answering the audience; people keep asking as he goes, and he picks some to answer. Besides talking, a speaker can post text, images, even short video, and many prepare slides and push them out as they speak, much like a lecture in a room.

A Live runs one to two hours. Even at the lowest preparation count, 11 hours, Weng Xin's real rate per session is 5,531 / (8 + 3 + 2) = 425 yuan.

Weng Xin also told us that Hesenbao, a Zhihu honorary member and a docent at the National Museum of China, prepares for far longer. "He told me he usually spends three weeks, because he can't afford to get anything wrong," Weng Xin said.

Tian Jishun, an obstetrician, prepares in the spare hours of one or two days, six to eight hours in all. Take his latest session, "How to Get Through the First Three Months of Pregnancy, Scientifically": priced at 39 yuan and attended by 963 people, it works out to a little over 4,000 yuan an hour.

We interviewed ten speakers. The best session among them grossed well over 100,000 yuan, the weakest 3,000. Not one said he or she could simply start talking without preparing; the shortest preparation was five or six hours.

By our count, the cut-off for the top 20% of Lives by revenue is 20,000 yuan a session. Even at six hours of preparation plus an hour of talking, that speaker earns 2,850 yuan an hour.

So a Zhihu Live speaker's real hourly rate may be a fraction of the "over 10,000 yuan" Zhihu advertises — in some cases a few percent of it.

Then there is how often you can do it. Not every field can be worked the way Weng Xin works art, dozens of Lives deep.

Tian Jishun has given 12. He likes to bundle up the questions he is asked day to day and answer them in one session. He has not posted a new one in a long time. "I've already covered the most common questions," he said. "The way I understand Live, you give the talk and it sits there."

An Qian (not his real name), a Live speaker with a doctorate in economics, says that as he sees it, Live earnings are on the way down. "More and more people are giving Lives, and the takings get spread thinner," he told QDaily. He is still happy enough with what he makes, but once Zhihu starts taking its cut he will have to weigh cost against return.

His first Live earned 12,500 yuan, which puts him in the top 35% of Zhihu Live speakers.

Our numbers bear him out: average revenue per session really is falling.

Most of the speakers we reached said money is not what they care about most. Weng Xin says what he values is the back-and-forth of a live session; several told us they had learned a great deal themselves from giving one. He Tao called Live a good way to learn something deeply — and a way to test how well you have learned it.

Even in a hand-picked first year, revenue followed the 80/20 rule

For more than half a year after Live formally launched, Zhihu kept it in a half-closed trial.

Live was never open to every user. For the first two months it followed the path Zhihu takes with all its new products: start with a small group of testers and have the team show them how to use it.

Every Live in that period carried the marks of hand-tuning. Each had an attendance cap; in early testing only a small share of users could even see the sign-up button, and Zhihu's system pushed it to people who had interacted with the guest or had some connection to the topic.

The technology could handle 2,000 people, but to balance the quality of the talk against the quality of the interaction, the cap never rose above 800.

Speakers were screened too.

They were invited directly by Zhihu's operations team, or recommended by speakers who had already given a Live. Most were highly regarded answerers in their fields, with followers and a body of work already on Zhihu; some had published Zhihu e-books.

To see which subjects worked, early topics ranged widely — "Analyzing Corporate Annual Reports," "Three Things About Art That Stump Us," "An Operating System for Starting a Company," "How to Build a Pond at Home." Nearly all were priced at 9.99 yuan, the test price set by the operations team.

Even among this relatively influential group, the classic 80/20 split appeared: the top 20% of Lives by revenue took in 51.154 million yuan, or 78.6% of everything Live earned.

The single biggest earner was a one-off Live by the Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz, whom Zhihu brought in: 345,600 yuan. Second was a session by the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, at close to 240,000 yuan. Only after them come Zhihu's own users, Ge Jin and Li Xiaolai.

We compiled the speakers, prices and revenue of the first 50 Lives. These were the seed users Zhihu picked, but attendance caps kept early earnings down: 12,715 yuan per session on average.

Those first 50 Lives had 48 speakers. Some, like the art agent Weng Xin, went on to give 26; others, like the documentary director Guan Yadi, tried the product once and put their energy elsewhere. Over the following year each gave 4.58 Lives on average, roughly one every two months.

For comparison, we also compiled the most popular Lives of the past 30 days: those fifty speakers now gross 15,233 yuan per session, at an average ticket price of 19.79 yuan.

Zhihu Live: a product timeline

2016.5.14

Zhou Yuan announced at the Salt Club that Live was about to launch

2016.5.16

@Sgt Pepper gave the first Zhihu Live — Analyzing Commercial Bank Annual Reports

2016.6.23

Zhihu Live passed 100 sessions

2016.7.26

Live added a "buy after it ends" option

2016.8.23

Live's 100th day since launch

2016.11.2

Live added ratings; users can rate the Lives they have attended

2016.11.2

Live collections launched: Zhihu's operations team picks Lives on the same or similar themes and bundles them together.

2016.12.6

The "Zhihu Live" WeChat official account launched; type a keyword into it and you can search for Lives

2017.4.24

A seven-day no-questions-asked refund arrived: within seven days of purchase, a user who has listened to no more than 15 audio clips can ask for the money back for any reason. Ratings were made public. Zhihu also began recruiting Live speakers openly and simplified the application process.

Once a Live is over, later sales bring in only 20% of the total

A Live sells before it happens, and it stays on sale after it ends.

In the one to two months after a session finished, what Tian Jishun earned through "buy after it ends" still came to 20% of what he had made beforehand — in line with the average Zhihu publishes.

He is content with that. "The Live is over. The thing has already dropped off your timeline."

Tian Jishun's revenue per session sits in the top 20% of all speakers.

Weng Xin stopped giving Lives early this year for health reasons, yet "buy after it ends" still brings him more than 10,000 yuan a month. He finds that number more attractive to a speaker than any hourly rate, because it points to the value Zhihu's ecosystem keeps returning after the talk is over.

"Not that anyone should sit back and live off it, but this isn't a one-shot deal at some so-called 3,000-yuan hourly rate. When I see a session pick up twenty more listeners over a month, I learn what Zhihu's audience is interested in," he said.

That 20% also means that most speakers who want a steady income from Live have to give more sessions, and keep giving them.

Zhihu says that as of March its site drew more than 10 billion visits a month, with 300 million users visiting at least once. A huge amount of that traffic has yet to turn into a Live purchase.

Li Shenshen, a Zhihu co-founder, says that from here on, good speakers and good Lives will get exposure and recommendations through targeted algorithms.

Other companies sell knowledge differently, and every one of them is still early

Over the past year, products that charge for knowledge and experience have multiplied. Alongside the live Q&A tools — Fenda, Zhihu's own paid-answer product (also spelled Zhihu), Weibo Q&A — and the Live-like products various platforms have launched, the format that pays those doing the sharing most steadily is the paid subscription column.

Dedao, Ximalaya and others sell paid courses: they invite experts in a field to teach, publishing an audio installment of about ten minutes on a fixed schedule, priced anywhere from a few dozen yuan to 200. Dedao and Ximalaya are the two biggest platforms of the kind.

The biggest difference from Zhihu Live is the shape of the demand on the listener. A Live asks for an unbroken hour or more; Dedao and Ximalaya have cut each installment to about ten minutes, and never more than twenty.

Dedao is where both the platform and the speakers put in the most.

On June 5, 2016, Dedao launched its first paid subscription column, Li Xiang's Business Briefing, written by Li Xiang, former editor-in-chief of the magazine Caijing Tianxia, and published every weekday evening. It now has close to 100,000 subscribers.

Li Xiang told QDaily that over the year and more since, to keep the column coming out daily, he has taken no holiday and almost no rest. At Dedao's office in Beijing's Langyuan he has a permanent desk, where he writes.

Wan Weigang, who writes the column Elite Daily Class, was a physics professor; after deciding to take the column he quit his job to do this and nothing else. Pu Yin, who writes Lao Pu on Chinese Characters, also gave up his other work to produce ten minutes a day full-time.

Some columnists write the script and hand the recording to a narrator; Pu Yin records his own. To get the sound right, Dedao gave his column a dedicated editor, Qiqi, who goes into the studio and sits with him every time. "That way what I record feels like a heart-to-heart. What a subscriber hears on the phone isn't some distant person lecturing at you, it's me talking it over with you," Pu Yin said.

Pu Yin's column now has 15,925 subscribers. The WeChat group that runs it day to day holds seven or eight Dedao staff besides him. Dedao also built a character-card feature specifically for his column, and made the app display oracle-bone script properly.

So far Dedao has opened only 24 columns, each priced at 199 yuan. At a briefing in March, founder Luo Zhenyu released a set of numbers: 1.44 million column subscriptions sold in total; leaving out the Luoji Siwei column, which costs 1 yuan, the remaining 800,000 brought in close to 160 million yuan.

Dedao looks more like a traditional media company. It has 170 to 180 staff, and beyond the subscription columns it sells books and e-books. CEO Tuo Buhua told QDaily that going from a decision to open a column in a given field to the product's launch — choosing the author, signing, agreeing on the outline — takes six months at best and nine to twelve at worst. How to scale that up is the problem it has to solve.

At that briefing Luo Zhenyu said the paid-knowledge business has only just begun.

He put it in a comparison: "This trade isn't big. The few companies leading it right now make very limited money. The other day I learned there's a Sanyuanli market not far north of here, where a fruit stall turns over something like 40,000 yuan a day. Seven or eight fruit stalls and you have the entire revenue of one of the companies at the front of this industry. So no — up to now I don't think it even counts as a hot sector."

Ximalaya has opened considerably more paid subscription columns than Dedao. It began preparing paid content at roughly the same time Zhihu Live launched. In how closely it manages that content, it sits between Zhihu and Dedao.

Ximalaya now has 2,000 paid knowledge hosts. Its best seller, Speak Well, from the team behind U Can U BB, is expected to bring in 50 million yuan a year; but plenty of its hosts work in niche fields, and even the most influential speaker does not necessarily produce a million-yuan hit.

In the interview, Yu Jianjun said they are digging for the most "top-tier" content creators in different fields. "The way we work is like publishing a book — packaging, planning, connecting with users. The most important parts are the packaging, the planning and the pilot episode, all up front."

Wang Peiyu, the well-known Yu-school Peking Opera performer at the Shanghai Peking Opera Theatre, is a good example. Away from the stage she works on passing the art form on and teaching it. She has appeared on variety shows including U Can U BB Conference and The Reader, again to promote Peking Opera and bring it to a wider public. In September 2016 she started a daily paid column on Ximalaya, Peking Opera Is Actually Fun.

The program has earned her less than 100,000 yuan, but what she cares about is what a daily show does for Peking Opera.

"At Ximalaya's 123 Carnival last year, the top three sellers in opera and folk performance were Guo Degang, Wang Peiyu, Guo Degang. If I hadn't done it, it might have been Guo Degang, Guo Degang, Guo Degang," she told QDaily. "You could say Ximalaya has given Peking Opera a place of its own. It has opened a door for Peking Opera and for other traditional forms, and let more people find out how beautiful Chinese opera is."

Ximalaya does not publish revenue figures as transparently as Zhihu, so there is no comparing them. But its co-CEO Yu Jianjun told QDaily that paying users are still under 1% of the total.

Subscriptions to these columns usually run nine months or a year, so unlike Zhihu Live they do not have to win a fresh purchase with every installment.

But a few months from now, when those subscription periods end, how many of today's users will renew?

The real test has not arrived yet.

What will Zhihu change about Live?

Weng Xin and Tian Jishun each had about 100,000 Zhihu followers before they gave their first Live. For speakers who answer well but work in a narrow field, and so have few followers, promoting a Live on their own reach is no easy thing.

Some time after launch, Live added a way to buy a session and give it to a friend; some speakers buy their own sessions and share them to Moments and WeChat groups, which means paying for their own marketing in both time and money.

In a Live called "Come Talk With the Zhihu Team About New Possibilities in Paid Knowledge," Li Shenshen set out what Zhihu will change next. The main thing is still how to put a Live in front of more people — and make sure those people want it.

Last November Live began experimenting with courses and collections. A course invites a speaker to bundle several upcoming Lives around one theme and sell them together; unlike an ordinary single Live, the speaker has to prepare the outline and the takeaways for every session at the outset. Cram for the LSAT with a Yale PhD, say, or study art history with a professor from Peking University. Courses now account for roughly 24% of gross revenue.

A collection is a compilation put together by Zhihu's own editors out of Lives that already exist, bundled by hand and sold at a package discount.

Live still has no tab of its own in the Zhihu app, and the web version's search offers no way to search Lives specifically. To search them by keyword you have to follow the Zhihu Live WeChat account.

On a user's profile page, though, you can now see the Lives that person has given and attended. A dedicated link has also appeared beside answers, pointing to related Lives.

Next, Zhihu will start subsidizing traffic for Live speakers. It will pick out the good ones by weighing how much a speaker contributes to the community, how many Lives he or she has given, the quality of the content, the interaction data, sales, user retention and repeat purchases, and the speaker's standing in a professional field on the site; it will then push that content through "editors' picks" and match it to users by algorithm.

Public job listings show Zhihu offering feed algorithm engineers 50,000 to 100,000 yuan a month. They would be responsible for tuning recommendations across the whole site: everyday questions and answers, columns, e-books and advertising.

An algorithm is now every tech company's answer to every problem.

Whatever the answer, for a company six years old, it has to come faster than this.

Corrections:

1. The article originally said that Li Xiaolai's Live, "Build a Reading Operating System That Will Serve You for Life, in One Hour," grossed more than 12 million yuan in a single session. We have since been corrected: that Live was priced at 1 yuan at the time and drew 120,000 people, while the price after it ended was 100 yuan. The relevant figures have been fixed.

2. Among the ten highest-grossing Lives, several — Ge Jin's Formalwear 101: Dress Right Before You Dress Expensive and Daniel FC's Pen Calligraphy 101: Start Writing Well Today, among others — ran promotions at launch; the sales here are counted at list price.

Charts by Zhu Ruomiao

Cover image: Zhihu Salt Club, Pixabay