Zhihu made a profit of 17.16 million yuan in Q1 2026, with paid content and IP operations playing a major role.

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On June 3, Zhihu released its financial report for the first quarter of 2026.

During the reporting period, Zhihu achieved a total revenue of 652 million yuan, a slight quarter-over-quarter increase of 1.3%, but a significant year-over-year decline of 10.7% from the 730 million yuan in the same period in 2025. However, while revenue fundamentals contracted, the profit side showed significant improvement: adjusted net profit (Non-GAAP) reached 17.16 million yuan, up 147.2% year-over-year, achieving a strong turnaround to profitability compared to the previous quarter.

This reflects a clear strategic shift by Zhihu in the deep waters of commercialization, abandoning the extensive approach of striving for user scale expansion and absolute revenue growth in its early years, and turning to strictly controlling costs for real profit certainty. Zhihu’s management attributed profitability to the “rigorous implementation of an efficiency-oriented strategy” in its financial report.

According to the financial data, Zhihu’s gross margin rebounded to 59.6% in the first quarter, although it is still below the 61.8% in the same period of 2025. The moderate gap in gross margins means the direct driver of returning to profitability is the 10.4% year-over-year reduction in total operating expenses. Specifically, sales and marketing expenses declined by 11.1% year-over-year, and R&D expenses were sharply reduced by 22.4%.

Achieving profitability by reducing marketing and R&D spending is a common defensive move as the internet industry enters a stock competition phase. By the end of the quarter, Zhihu’s cash and cash equivalents plus fixed-term deposits totaled 4.49 billion yuan, providing a relatively ample financial safety cushion.

A breakdown of revenue structure shows a fundamental shift in Zhihu’s commercialization foundation.

Marketing services, once Zhihu’s cash cow, only generated 191 million yuan this quarter, with its share dropping to 29.4%. Conservative willingness among advertisers and the platform’s strict governance of commercial content distribution make an explosive rebound in this segment unlikely in the short term.

Taking its place is the paid content and IP operations segment. Starting this quarter, Zhihu officially merged its previously separate paid reading revenue and copyright-related revenue into this category. This business contributed 402 million yuan in Q1 revenue, a 15.8% quarter-over-quarter increase, with its share in total revenue historically exceeding 60%.

In terms of subscription conversion, Zhihu’s average monthly subscription members in Q1 reached 13.1 million, a quarter-over-quarter increase of 7.9%. Upgrading from single subscription monetization to full-chain IP operations—for example, the number of Salted Words Story IP copyright collaborations increased more than five-fold year-over-year this quarter—Zhihu has found real profits deep in the online literature industry chain.

However, for practitioners of nonfiction reporting and business analysis, the potential tension is clear: the deeply immersive and emotionally charged “feel-good fiction” ecosystem structurally conflicts with Zhihu’s original “professional and hardcore” knowledge community DNA. Balancing commercial monetization with the platform’s objective knowledge community tone is a core issue management must confront.

Looking ahead, the tech industry’s narrative focus is rapidly shifting toward hardcore frontier areas like embodied intelligence and visual-language-action foundational models. These fields may seem far from Zhihu’s track, but their underlying logic is similar: training any advanced AI model in the physical world, or even large language models, requires massive high-quality corpus feeding.

Zhihu’s accumulation of real, professional Q&A data over more than ten years forms a scarce core asset in the AI era. This quarter, Zhihu clearly positioned itself as a high-quality, trustworthy data source and accelerated its data open platform construction, aiming to provide compliant corpora to foundational model vendors via standardized interfaces such as model-context protocols and APIs.

This “selling water to the gold miners” strategy up the AI industry chain has a strong business logic underpinning.

However, in terms of current financial performance, other revenue segments including AI data monetization and professional education only contributed 57.8 million yuan this quarter, accounting for just 8.9%. This means large-scale monetization of Zhihu’s data assets remains in a very early exploratory stage, still unable to effectively fill the revenue gap left by shrinking advertising business.

In summary, Zhihu has delivered a satisfactory interim report card. Management is no longer obsessed with the early internet narrative of scaling, but has responded to capital market doubts about its ability to generate profits with hard-cash single-quarter profitability.

Currently, Zhihu has basically completed the reconstruction of its business framework from a “classical Q&A community” to an “online literature paid and IP operation platform,” successfully stabilizing its cash flow foundations.

But to gain long-term valuation re-rating in the technology track in the next phase, cost control alone will not suffice. What the market is waiting for is when its AI data services and other second growth curves can truly achieve scale and become the new engine driving the overall revenue base back to positive growth.

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