How Zhihu’s Design Team Turned Text Content into a Video‑Driven Business

Zhihu Content Flow Mechanism

Zhihu distributes content around questions, treating each question as the core node that organizes answers and authors.

This loop places the question at the center.

Video, as a format that naturally builds personal branding, initially seemed less competitive, but Zhihu introduced two product forms: “video answers” that participate in the external question loop to drive traffic, and “video entities” that supplement internal traffic.

Video Production Challenges and Solutions

The main challenges are content sourcing and tone control. With visual media becoming mainstream, Zhihu built a suite of tools—PPT‑video, script, and editing tools—centered on “quick layout” to convert existing text into video quickly.

These tools are not a primary content source but a distinctive Zhihu‑style production path that can be continuously operated.

Beyond self‑produced content, Zhihu actively recruits external video creators and content, though the volume remains limited; therefore, the platform maximizes the value of existing content by converting between video answers and video entities, enriching the content pool and expanding consumption.

Maintaining Content Tone

When importing content, Zhihu prioritizes its own strength areas first, then the strengths of the video medium, applying internal quality grading to ensure standards.

Video templates and scripts are tailored to Zhihu’s strong domains and video‑medium strengths to encourage creator participation.

From Content Production to Distribution and Integration

Video content is integrated into the site, facing distribution and consumption difficulties due to its time dimension and higher technical thresholds.

Zhihu created the “video answer” type to increase content volume and maximize value, defining conversion logic between video answers and video entities, establishing both external and internal loops.

After a year of development, video has become an indispensable part of Zhihu’s content ecosystem.

Membership Business Evolution

Zhihu, a content‑monetization company, struggled with monetization in 2016. Early attempts (paid Q&A, courses, books) had limited scalability, with only the book line achieving profit.

From 2019 Q1 onward, the membership model was refined, adding SKUs and expanding into “big consumption” and “big education” lines, resulting in a 14‑fold GMV increase over ten quarters, becoming the core revenue driver.

Design’s Role in Business Phases

Support Phase : Designers ensure usability, learnability, and visual appeal, building trust with product teams.

Value‑Addition Phase : Design establishes internal/external workflows, brand assets, component libraries, and design systems.

Design‑Driven Phase : Designers act as project initiators, influencing business decisions and balancing commercial goals with user experience.

Ethical Reflections

Designers must avoid slipping from user‑experience focus to user‑exploitation, such as obscuring cancellation options or over‑testing users, and remain vigilant about maintaining ethical standards.

References include insights from Facebook design critiques and UX essays.