中國互聯網市場還有很多試驗可做

Where is the best place for a woman to travel? What do cinema goers think of the latest superhero movie? How does one register a business abroad? Each day, hundreds of thousands of queries such as these flood China’s most popular online question-and-answer forum.

女性最適合去哪裏旅遊？觀衆們覺得最新一部超級英雄電影怎麼樣？如何在海外註冊公司？每天有數以十萬計諸如此類的問題出現在中國最具人氣的在線問答論壇上。

Zhihu, which is today valued at $1.25bn, publishes online books, many written or edited by its top users and often based on trending topics, and sells podcasts and text explainers. Zhihu Live, a pay-per-view platform for livestreamed talks by celebrities and experts, attracts 4m viewers. In four years, Zhihu has generated 100m registered users and 780m unique monthly visitors, surpassing Quora’s 200m monthly visitors.

如今估值達12.5億美元的知乎(Zhihu)出版電子圖書（其中很多書都由其高級用戶撰寫或編輯，往往基於熱門話題），並出售直播內容和文字回答。知乎Live——由名人和專家主持的直播講座的付費觀看平臺——吸引了400萬觀看者。在四年時間內，知乎擁有了1億註冊用戶，月獨立訪客(UV)達7.8億——超過了Quora的2億。

The idea for Zhihu came to Zhou Yuan a decade ago when, as an enthusiast of a Chinese blog used by Apple lovers, he believed he could do something similar.

10年前，周源萌生了創辦知乎的念頭，當時他參加了一個聚集了很多蘋果(Apple)愛好者的中國博客，他認爲他可以做出類似的產品。

A founder at the now defunct apple4us, which opened up live debate among aficionados, later showed him a US Q&A forum. He was immediately inspired: “Quora felt so inexplicably familiar to me,” Mr Zhou says as he recalls that dinner in 2011 with his friend. “My ideas about creating an apple4us-like product suddenly came back. The dots connected.”

後來，apple4us（該平臺曾經是蘋果愛好者討論問題的活躍平臺，如今已停止更新）的發起人向他展示了美國的一個問答論壇，他立刻受到了啓發。周源在回憶2011年與朋友的那次晚餐時表示，Quora讓我感覺莫名地熟悉，我想做一款與apple4us類似產品的想法突然又回來了，分散的點都連起來了。

The next day he recruited two of his business partners from Metasearch, a data analytics company and his first dip into entrepreneurship, to build their own version. An executive of a listed Chinese company came on board as an angel investor the same day. The company has raised $87m in three subsequent funding rounds. In January, Zhihu raised a further $100m from investors including Tencent, the internet group, and Sinovation Ventures, the venture capital company co-founded by Kai-Fu Lee, a former Google China executive.

第二天，他招募了他在Meta搜索（他第一次創業時創辦的一家數據分析公司）的兩位商業夥伴，來創建自己的問答產品。同一天，中國某上市公司的一名高管以天使投資人的身份加入。該公司在隨後三輪融資中籌集了8700萬美元。今年1月，知乎完成了D輪融資，從互聯網集團騰訊(Tencent)和風投公司創新工場（Sinovation Ventures，谷歌(Google)前中國區高管李開復是該公司的共同創始人）等投資方那裏籌集了1億美元的融資。

Mr Zhou came of age during the rise of China’s tech titans. NetEase, the Chinese internet company founded in 1997, was popular and instrumental in the formation of start-ups such as the search engine company Baidu and internet company Sina. These businesses inspired Mr Zhou to study computer science and become a software programmer, and later a journalist.

1998年，周源18歲，如今的中國科技巨頭那時剛剛開始崛起：創立於1997年的中國互聯網公司網易(NetEase)當時很受歡迎，網民都離不開它；互聯網公司新浪(Sina)剛剛成立；搜索引擎公司百度(Baidu)也將在幾年後創立。這些企業激勵了周源學習計算機科學併成爲軟件程序員，後來又成爲了記者。

Zhihu rose from the ashes of Mr Zhou’s first company. “I was feeling very sad and lost,” the entrepreneur recalls of 2010 when his company Metasearch failed.

知乎從周源第一家公司的廢墟中誕生。回憶起2010年他創立的Meta搜索倒閉，他表示，“我當時感覺非常難過和迷茫。”

Zhihu’s ambition today is to forge connections between users in an on-demand knowledge marketplace free of intermediaries. Most recently, Zhihu partnered with a recruiting company to assess users’ employability for companies such as ride-hailing platform Didi Chuxing and sharing bike start-up Mobike.

如今知乎的抱負是，服務於按需提供的知識市場上的用戶，幫助他們在無需第三方的情況下彼此直接建立起聯繫。最近，知乎與一家招聘公司合作，評估用戶是否適合被叫車平臺滴滴出行(Didi Chuxing)和共享單車初創公司摩拜(Mobike)等公司聘用。

“Before you might buy a book but you could not ask questions about it,” he says, as he demonstrates on his iPhone a talk he gave on Zhihu Live, “How to be a game-changer”.

“以前，你或許可以買書，但你不能就這本書提問。”他一邊說，一邊在他的iPhone上展示自己在知乎Live上一場關於如何成爲遊戲規則改變者的演講。

For its first two years, Zhihu selected whom it would invite to use the service. Others could apply and wait to be approved. Many, who were desperate to join, turned to Taobao, an ecommerce site that sold invitation codes from approved individuals for up to Rmb120 ($18).

在創辦的最初兩年裏，知乎有選擇地邀請了一些人成爲知乎用戶。其他人可以申請並等待批准。很多渴望加入的人求助於電商網站淘寶(Taobao)，以高達120元人民幣（合18美元）的價格購買來自獲批用戶的邀請碼。

Meanwhile the Chinese authorities have this year stepped up their policing of content platforms, targeting news apps such as Toutiao and the micro-blogging platform Sina Weibo while shutting down popular social media accounts it deemed “vulgar”. As Zhihu expands, it must balance fostering lively discussion online while keeping China’s cyber space authorities happy.

與此同時，今年中國政府加大了對內容平臺的監管（頭條(Toutiao)等新聞應用以及新浪微博(Sina Weibo)都成爲監管的目標），並關閉了其認爲“粗俗”的高人氣社交網站賬戶。不斷擴張的知乎必須在培養在線討論活躍度的同時，讓中國網絡監管部門保持滿意。

To identify spam, Zhihu uses Monkey King, an artificial intelligence program named after the protagonist in the Chinese epic fantasy drama Journey to the West. Wall-E, another AI program, finds and deletes defamatory or offensive posts. Meanwhile, a team of editors in Sichuan field user complaints, which have risen tenfold since last year, according to Mr Zhou.

知乎使用人工智能(AI)程序“悟空”來識別垃圾廣告信息，使用另一個AI程序“瓦力”(Wall-E)來識別和刪除誹謗性或攻擊性信息。此外，據周源介紹，知乎在四川還有一支編輯團隊負責處理用戶舉報——自去年以來用戶舉報量增至原來的10倍。

This content management approach has not always been ideal. Users complain that subtle advertising written into blog posts has increased as the site has become more commercial.

這種內容管理方式並不總是理想的。用戶抱怨稱，帖子中植入軟廣的情況越來越多，知乎變得更商業化了。

Despite the unpredictability of user-generated content — he turns around at one point to write the word “trolls” on the glass behind him to illustrate the shortcomings of the freewheeling American internet — he still believes in a user-driven product.

儘管用戶生成的內容是無法預測的——他轉身在背後的玻璃上寫下“噴子”兩個字，來闡明美國隨心所欲的互聯網環境的缺點——但他仍然對用戶驅動型產品有信心。

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“In the US, if you publish an essay, many people avoid reading comments because they are full of trolls,” Mr Zhou says. “On the Chinese internet, the comment section is usually the most interesting.”

“在美國，如果你發表一篇文章，很多人會避免閱讀評論，因爲評論區都是噴子。”周源表示，“在中國互聯網上，評論區通常是最有意思的。”

Mr Zhou’s intuition has paid off. He credits a commitment to Zhihu’s core Q&A function that helped the site survive even as many similar ones failed. However, the pressure to make Zhihu’s knowledge base commercially viable is intensifying. It faces competition from platforms such as the smaller but fast-growing Fenda, where users pay to ask questions, as well as Douban, a social network and online forum.

周源的直覺得到了回報。雖然許多類似的網站都失敗了，但知乎存活了下來，周源將這歸功於知乎核心的問答功能。然而，知乎承受的要求其將知識庫變現的壓力正在加劇。它面臨着來自分答（這個用戶在上面付費提問的平臺規模較小但發展迅速）等平臺以及社交網絡和在線論壇豆瓣(Douban)的競爭。

That does not worry Mr Zhou: “The Chinese internet is really a big market. There is still plenty of experimentation to be done.”

周源對此並不擔心：“中國互聯網的市場真的很大。還有很多試驗可做。”