On August 26, Zhihu (02390.HK, ZH.US) released its second-quarter 2026 earnings report. The company's total revenue for the quarter was 690 million yuan, an increase of 5.9% quarter-over-quarter and a decrease of 3.7% year-over-year, with the annual decline narrowing further. Among these figures, revenue from paid content and IP operations reached 426 million yuan, up 4.4% year-over-year and 5.9% quarter-over-quarter, accounting for 61.7% of total revenue and serving as the primary driver of sequential growth.
Shifting focus away from the single-quarter revenue and profit figures, it becomes clear that the changes occurring at Zhihu are not limited to its financial statements. The content, creators, and professional expertise that have been accumulated within the community over the past decade are being systematically reorganized. Concurrently, AI is also beginning to integrate into more segments of Zhihu's content value chain—a key theme that management repeatedly emphasized during the post-earnings conference call.
Where the Company's Focus Lies
Zhihu's founder, chairman, and CEO, Zhou Yuan, stated, "At this stage, we are more focused on whether our core business can maintain stability, whether new business can generate genuine customer value and reusable capabilities, and whether the overall return on investment is reasonable. We will maintain a prudent investment pace, with the long-term goal remaining improving the revenue structure and restoring sustainable profitability." For Zhihu, perhaps what deserves greater attention now is not just short-term profit fluctuations or when revenue will return to growth, but a more fundamental question: in the current technological and commercial landscape, how should the value of a content community truly be measured?
The Untapped Long-Term Potential of Content
Historically, user scale, membership subscriptions, and marketing services have been the primary metrics, for observing Zhihu's commercialization. However, as content consumption matures, Zhihu is increasingly looking to content itself to drive value creation. For a content community operating for over a decade, the continuously growing volume of content and creator base itself constitutes foundational assets accumulated over the long term.
As of the end of the second quarter, Zhihu's cumulative content reached approximately 993 million pieces, a year-over-year increase of 9%. The cumulative number of creators reached 81.5 million, up 3.1% year-over-year. Daily new high-quality content in the second quarter increased by over 16% year-over-year, with AI-related professional content surging by 37%. Average daily usage time for core users remained stable at approximately 39 minutes.
On the membership front, Zhihu's average monthly subscribed members stood at 13.1 million, roughly flat compared to the first quarter. In the first half year paid content and IP operations recorded revenue of 828 million yuan, consistent with the same period last year. Even without further growth in member numbers, the paid content business maintained relative stability. Notably, IP operations have emerged as a new source of growth.
In the second quarter, the number of copyright cooperation agreements for Zhihu's Yanyan Story brand increased by 671% year-over-year, with author copyright revenue growing 620%. By the end of the second quarter, Zhihu's collaborative production model with Tinghuadao had launched seven high-quality short dramas. Among them, "Wrong Marriage with Joy" has accumulated over 3 billion views, and "Sister, He's Really My Brother-in-Law" surpassed 2 billion views. Additionally, three AI-powered comic dramas adapted from Yanyan Story IPs each exceeded 900 million views.
This indicates that the lifecycle of a single piece of content is being extended. Once content enters IP development, it can generate value beyond advertising and membership revenue, extending into copyright partnerships, short-drama adaptations, comic-drama formats, and other scenarios. This also explains why merely observing a single quarter's content costs or profit changes may not fully capture the long-term value of such investments.
During the conference call, Zhou Yuan mentioned that AI is lowering the cost and barriers to transforming text-based IP into formats like comic-dramas, short dramas, and film/television productions. For different projects, Zhihu will choose between licensing, self-production, or commissioned production models based on project economics, while maintaining a cautious approach to capital-intensive investments.
AI Gives Zhihu's Expertise a New Value Proposition
This transformation also extends to AI. Zhou Yuan stated that AI is becoming a new medium connecting users and content, enabling Zhihu's long-accumulated content, IPs, and expert capabilities to enter a broader range of applications and commercial scenarios. Currently, Zhihu is exploring business initiatives centered around AI content assets, expert data solutions, AI Works, and Zhihu CLI. Among these, the AI-related content asset business saw its customer base grow by 50% quarter-over-quarter in the second quarter. The expert data solutions have already expanded into model capability directions such as coding, search and deep research, visual reasoning, and agentic systems.
Unlike IP development, the value of AI-related businesses lies not primarily in the secondary consumption of content, but in enabling Zhihu's professionally curated content and expert knowledge to penetrate new industrial scenarios. For instance, within the expert data solutions, Zhihu does not simply provide vast datasets. Instead, it addresses gaps in frontier models' capabilities through expert participation, training data design, complex task environment construction, and model evaluation, helping models improve specific competencies.
Management also emphasized during the call that the goal of this business is not merely to deliver data, but to solve clients' specific model capability challenges and, in turn, form reusable competencies. In this context, the "professionalism" Zhihu has built over the years is beginning to manifest in a new value framework. Professional content, authentic experiences, credible information, and the creator ecosystem capable of continuously producing this content—all may hold renewed commercial significance.
Of course, these AI ventures are still in the validation stage of commercialization. Zhou Yuan clearly stated, "The company will allocate resources based on genuine market demand, customer value, and return on investment. While stabilizing the core business, we will prudently validate the sustainability of new initiatives."
Signals from Capital Allocation
This long-term value assessment can also be observed through the company's capital actions. As of July 30, 2026, Zhihu held a combined total of 4.424 billion yuan in cash and cash equivalents, time deposits, restricted funds, and short-term investments. By the end of the second quarter, the company had repurchased a cumulative 41.3 million Class A ordinary shares at a total consideration of $77.9 million. In the second quarter alone, Zhihu repurchased 6.5 million shares, investing $7.2 million.
Wang Han, CFO of Zhihu, stated during the earnings call that the company will continue to maintain prudent capital allocation and persistently execute share repurchases to maximize long-term shareholder value.
Reevaluating Zhihu in the AI era suggests its value can no longer be measured simply by member count or advertising revenue. If content assets, IP development, and AI-related professional capabilities can progressively develop into replicable business models, then these long-term accumulated resources are poised to become Zhihu's new value pillar in the AI era. For a community platform with nearly one billion pieces of content and over 80 million creators, this transformation may be far more significant than any single quarter's profit-and-loss statement.
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