On August 26, Zhihu-W (02390) released its second quarter and first-half earnings report for fiscal 2026. The company generated RMB 690 million in revenue for the second quarter, representing a 5.9% increase quarter-over-quarter. After achieving its first full-year non-GAAP profitability in 2025, Zhihu continued to maintain non-GAAP profitability in the first half of 2026, with an adjusted net profit of RMB 6.906 million. The company's operational efficiency has continued to improve, demonstrating considerable business resilience.
During a period when the macroeconomy is undergoing a critical transition between old and new growth drivers, this earnings report not only confirms Zhihu's ability to navigate economic cycles but also sends a strong positive signal to the capital markets. This is far more than a simple financial scorecard; it represents a systematic value reassessment of Zhihu at the intersection of the "professional community" and the "AI era." Behind the numbers lies deep progress in revenue structure optimization, full-lifecycle IP development, and the commercialization of AI data assets.
Zhihu is demonstrating through solid results that, on top of the moat built by high-quality content, its long-accumulated content assets and expert networks are being converted into sustained growth momentum through AI and IP operations. This article will decode Zhihu's value reconstruction journey in the AI era from three perspectives: the stability of its core business, the breakthrough of new growth drivers, and the upgrading of new engines.
Core Business Stability: A High-Quality Community as the Ballast for Navigating Cycles
In the second half of the internet era, where traffic dividends have peaked, the valuation logic for content platforms has undergone a fundamental restructuring. Pure traffic scale is no longer the core pricing basis; instead, profitability, operating leverage, and the counter-cyclical nature of revenue structures have become key benchmarks for assessing corporate health. Zhihu's performance in the first half of 2026 is a positive response to this new valuation logic, and its demonstrated operational resilience signals that the company has entered a phase of high-quality, endogenous growth.
From a financial perspective, Zhihu's core highlight in the first half of the year is not the absolute growth rate of revenue but the structural improvement of its income statement. While total revenue remained stable at RMB 1.342 billion, total operating expenses declined by 11.7% year-over-year, and adjusted operating losses narrowed significantly by 19.5%. This "scissor gap" where expense reductions significantly outpace revenue declines sends a powerful positive signal: Zhihu's cost control and resource allocation optimization have achieved substantive results, and operating leverage is beginning to take effect. This indicates that the company possesses strong self-sustaining cash generation capabilities, building a financial safety cushion amid macroeconomic uncertainty.
The more critical strategic inflection point lies in the transformation of Zhihu's revenue structure. In the second quarter, paid content and IP operations revenue accounted for 61.7% of total revenue, a figure that signals the gradual strengthening of a diversified monetization model centered on users' direct willingness to pay. This "subscription plus IP" model, built on the trust of high-net-worth users, not only offers higher gross margins and cash flow certainty but also provides the company with a "ballast stone" to navigate macroeconomic cycles.
The foundation underlying this positive resonance between financials and business model lies in Zhihu's "authentic professional content" moat in the AI era. Amid the proliferation of AIGC and the homogenization of internet information, Zhihu's nearly one billion pieces of professional, trustworthy content created by real human creators, along with its status as the largest base for short-form web fiction, have become the scarcest high-quality language assets in the market. This content ecosystem, built by 81.5 million creators and 13.1 million highly engaged subscribed members, not only maintains extremely high retention and payment willingness among core users but also elevates Zhihu from a traditional content consumption platform to a "knowledge asset operator" with formidable barriers to entry. This ecosystem closed loop, based on trust and professionalism, is Zhihu's most core value in the era of zero-sum competition.
Growth Driver Breakthrough: Full-Lifecycle IP Operations Unlock Content Asset Potential
If paid membership constitutes Zhihu's risk-resilient "core foundation," then IP operations represent a new variable with immense imagination that can break through its growth ceiling. The explosive growth of the IP operations business in the earnings report is by no means an accidental traffic dividend; rather, it reflects a profound leap in Zhihu's business model — a comprehensive upgrade from a traditional "content subscription platform" to an "IP source factory" and "content asset operator."
From the perspective of business model evolution, Zhihu is leveraging its core asset, "Yan Yan Stories," to completely break through the monetization limitations of a single reading scenario. By connecting the full chain from text to short dramas, AI comic dramas, and audiobooks, Zhihu has achieved cross-media and cross-format reuse of content value. Under the model of "Yan Yan Stories IP plus Tinghuadao Studio production," seven premium short dramas have been launched. Among them, "Wrong Marriage with Joy" and "Sister, He's Really My Brother-in-Law" have surpassed 3 billion and 2 billion views, respectively. Additionally, three AI-powered human comic dramas adapted from Yan Yan Stories IPs have each exceeded 900 million views, further validating the market appeal of Yan Yan Stories' premium IPs.
This full-lifecycle development model not only significantly enhances the long-term commercial value of individual IPs but also enables content assets to generate a continuous "long-tail effect" of compounding returns. More critically, the deep involvement of AI technology is reshaping the cost structure of the content industry. Zhihu is accelerating investment in adapting web fiction into AI comic dramas. AI has not only dramatically compressed the costs and timelines of traditional film and television production processes such as storyboarding and character design but has also made the scalable development of mid-tier IPs feasible. This technology-driven leap in productivity means that Zhihu's IP business is bypassing the "heavy asset" trap of the traditional entertainment industry, arriving at a dual inflection point of profit margins and expansion speed.
From the capital markets perspective, the explosion of the IP business is reconstructing Zhihu's valuation logic. When Zhihu can consistently transform massive volumes of written content into popular culture products, its valuation anchor shifts from a traditional "internet community" to "full-industry-chain IP operations." As the "create-screen-adapt-distribute" business closed loop matures, Zhihu is using IP as a lever to unlock incremental value in the trillion-yuan pan-entertainment market, demonstrating robust and sustainable growth momentum.
New Engine Upgrade: AI Empowerment Builds the Core Barrier of a "Data Gold Mine"
At a time when AI large models are reshaping industries across the board, Zhihu's capital markets narrative is undergoing a profound upgrade. Market perception is no longer limited to viewing it as a traditional Q&A community; instead, it is being redefined as an indispensable "high-quality data gold mine" in the upstream segment of the AI industry chain. Amid the flood of AIGC and the homogenization of general-purpose corpora, Zhihu is building an extremely scarce core barrier through its synergistic advantage of "high-quality content, expert networks, and AI capabilities."
From an industry logic standpoint, Zhihu is successfully entering the AI infrastructure track by leveraging its deep repository of authentic expert corpora. Its "Expert Data Solutions" essentially transforms the professional knowledge accumulated within its community into standardized B-end data services. By providing large model companies with integrated services covering data production, quality control, and model evaluation and validation, Zhihu has successfully achieved a transformation from a "content distribution platform" to a "core AI data service provider." The implementation of this B-end data service not only opens up a new revenue stream for Zhihu but also directly involves the company in the foundational construction of AI technology, positioning it to share in the underlying dividends of the large model era.
What is even more sophisticated is Zhihu's construction of a two-way flywheel effect where "AI empowers the community, and the community feeds AI." On the B-end, Zhihu converts its content assets into infrastructure that can be called upon by AI through its data open platform and AI Works project marketplace. On the C-end, the integration of intelligent functions such as AI Search and AI Viewing Mountain significantly improves supply-demand matching efficiency, lowers the production threshold for creators, and in turn nourishes the community ecosystem, generating more high-quality content. The operation of this "data flywheel" is fundamentally reconstructing Zhihu's valuation logic.
As Zhihu's business model upgrades from mere "traffic monetization" to "AI data infrastructure plus community ecosystem," its valuation anchor will correspondingly shift. As AI data services are replicated and deployed across more vertical sectors, the commercial value of Zhihu's "data gold mine" will be continuously reassessed, demonstrating highly certain long-term growth potential.
Looking at Zhihu's overall performance in the first half of 2026, this is not merely a financial report demonstrating operational resilience amid macroeconomic uncertainty; it is a milestone marking the systematic upgrade of its business model. From the profitability foundation built by its high-quality community, to the new growth points unlocked through full-lifecycle IP operations, to the core barriers established by its AI-powered "data gold mine," Zhihu has successfully crossed the growth bottleneck of traditional content platforms.
More profoundly, this series of strategic implementations is completely reshaping Zhihu's capital markets narrative. With the deep integration of AI data infrastructure and full-industry-chain IP operations, Zhihu's valuation logic is undergoing a fundamental shift from a single "internet community" to an "AI data asset plus IP operations platform." There is strong reason to believe that as the value of its core assets becomes increasingly visible, Zhihu is approaching a moment of highly certain value reassessment, and its long-term growth space and commercial potential deserve fresh scrutiny and expectations from the capital markets.