On August 26, Zhihu (02390) officially disclosed the results report for the second quarter and first half of 2026. Zhihu achieved revenue of 690 million yuan in the second quarter, an increase of 5.9% over the previous quarter. Following the first full-year non-GAAP profit in 2025, Zhihu continued to maintain non-GAAP profits in the first half of 2026, with adjusted net profit of $6.906 million. The company's operational efficiency continues to improve, showing strong management resilience.
At a time when the macroeconomy is in a critical period of transition between old and new kinetic energy, this financial report not only confirms Zhihu's business resilience through the cycle, but also sends a strong positive signal to the capital market. This is not a simple financial report card, but rather a systematic revaluation of value at the intersection of the “professional community” and the “AI era.”
Behind the financial report is Zhihu's deep breakthrough in revenue structure optimization, IP lifecycle development, and commercialization of AI data assets. Zhihu is proving to the market with a solid questionnaire that on top of the moat of high-quality content construction, its long-term accumulated content assets and expert network are being transformed into a steady stream of growth momentum through AI and IP operations. Next, this article will deeply decode Zhihu's path of value restructuring in the AI era from the three dimensions of stable basic infrastructure, breakthrough growth, and upgrading the new engine.
Stable basic infrastructure: high-quality communities build a “ballast stone” to get through the cycle
In the second half of the Internet, where traffic dividends are at their peak, the capital market's valuation logic for content platforms has been fundamentally restructured: simply the scale of traffic is no longer the core pricing basis; the anti-cyclical nature of profitability, operating leverage, and revenue structures has become an important yardstick for testing the health of enterprises. Zhihu's performance in the first half of 2026 was a positive response to this new valuation logic. It showed operational resilience, indicating that the company has entered a stage of high-quality endogenous growth.
Looking at the fundamentals of finance, Zhihu's core focus in the first half of the year was not the absolute growth rate of revenue, but the structural improvement of the profit statement. While total revenue remained at the level of 1,342 billion yuan, total operating expenses decreased by 11.7% year-on-year, and adjusted operating losses narrowed sharply by 19.5%. This “cost reduction is significantly faster than revenue reduction” sends a strong positive signal: Zhihu's cost control and resource allocation optimization have reached the essence, and the operating leverage effect is showing. This means that the company already has strong self-hematopoietic capacity and has built a strong financial safety cushion amid macroeconomic uncertainty.
A more critical strategic inflection point is the transformation of Zhihu's revenue structure. Paid content and IP operating revenue accounted for 61.7% in the second quarter. This data indicates that Zhihu's diversified monetization model centered on users' willingness to pay directly is gradually being strengthened. This “subscription+IP” model, which is based on the trust of high-net-worth users, not only has higher gross margin and cash flow certainty, but also provides the company with a “ballast stone” to cross the macro cycle.
This healthy resonance between finance and business models is underpinned by the “real person professional content” moat built by Zhihu in the AI era. Against the backdrop of the proliferation of AIGC and increased homogenization of Internet information, Zhihu's nearly 1 billion pieces of professional and trustworthy content collected by real creators, as well as the largest base for creating short online articles, have become the scarcest high-quality corpus assets in the market. This content ecosystem, composed of 81.5 million creators and 13.1 million highly sticky subscribers, not only maintained the extremely high retention and payment intentions of core users, but also upgraded Zhihu from a traditional content consumption platform to an “intellectual asset operator” with extremely high barriers. This closed loop of ecology based on trust and professionalism is the core value of Zhihu in the era of stock gaming.
Growth breakthrough: IP lifecycle operation unlocks the potential of content assets
If paid membership has built Zhihu's “basic market” to resist risk, then IP operations are a new and highly imaginative variable that breaks the ceiling of growth. The explosive growth in the IP operating business in the financial report is not an accidental traffic dividend, but rather a profound shift in the business model by Zhihu — a comprehensive upgrade from a traditional “content subscription platform” to an “IP source factory” and “content asset operator”.
Judging from the evolution of the business model, Zhihu is relying on the core asset “Yanyan Story” to completely break the monetization limitations of a single reading scenario. By opening up the full link from text to skits, AI comics, and audiobooks, Zhihu has achieved cross-media and cross-form reuse of content value. Under the “Yanyan Story IP+ Listen to Flower Island Studio Production” model, 7 boutique skits have already been launched. Among them, “Happy Married by the Wrong Marriage” and “Sister, He's Really My Brother-in-law” surpassed 3 billion and 2 billion broadcasts, respectively. Furthermore, the 3 AI live-action comics adapted from Yanyan Story IP all surpassed 900 million broadcasts, further verifying the market appeal of Yanyan Story's high-quality IP. This full-life cycle development model not only greatly enhances the long-term commercial value of individual IPs, but also enables content assets to have a “long-term effect” of continuously generating compound benefits.
More importantly, the deep involvement of AI technology is reshaping the cost structure of the content industry. Zhihu is speeding up investment in rewriting AI comics online. AI has not only drastically reduced the cost and cycle of filming and character setting in traditional film and television production, but has also made large-scale development of mid-waist IP feasible. This technology-driven productivity leap means that Zhihu's IP business is crossing the “heavy asset” trap of the traditional film and television industry and ushered in a double inflection point in profit margins and speed of expansion.
From a capital market perspective, the explosion in the IP business is reshaping Zhihu's valuation logic. When Zhihu was able to continue to transform massive text content into popular pop culture products, its valuation anchor changed from a traditional “Internet community” to “the operation of the entire IP industry chain.” As the closed loop of “creation, selection, adaptation and distribution” becomes more mature, Zhihu is using IP as a fulcrum to leverage the incremental space of the trillion-level pan-entertainment market, showing strong and sustainable growth potential.
New engine upgrade: AI empowers to build the core barriers of the “data gold mine”
At a time when AI models are reshaping thousands of industries, Zhihu's capital market narrative is undergoing a profound upgrade. The market's perception of it is no longer limited to traditional question-and-answer communities, but is redefining it as an indispensable “high-quality data gold mine” upstream of the AI industry chain. In the context of the proliferation of AIGC and the trend towards homogenization of common language, Zhihu is building an extremely scarce core barrier with the synergy of “high-quality content × expert networks × AI capabilities”.
Judging from industry logic, Zhihu is successfully entering the AI infrastructure circuit by relying on its deep corpus of real experts. The “Expert Data Solution” it launched essentially transforms the expertise accumulated by the community into a standardized B-side data service. By providing integrated services covering data production, quality control, and model evaluation and verification for large model companies, Zhihu has successfully leapt from a “content distribution platform” to an “AI core data service provider”. The implementation of this B-side data service has not only opened up a new source of revenue for Zhihu, but also directly participated in the underlying construction of AI technology, which is expected to share the underlying dividends of the big model era.
What's even more exquisite is that Zhihu has built a two-way flywheel effect of “AI empowers the community, and the community feeds back AI”. On the B-side, Zhihu transforms content assets into infrastructure that can be used by AI through an open data platform and AI Works project plaza; on the C-side, the integration of intelligent functions such as AI search and AI mountain viewing has greatly improved the efficiency of matching supply and demand, lowered the production threshold for creators, and further fed back the community ecosystem and spawned more high-quality content.
The operation of this “data flywheel” is completely reconstructing Zhihu's valuation logic. When Zhihu's business model is upgraded from simple “traffic monetization” to “AI data infrastructure+community ecology,” its valuation anchor will also shift. With the reuse and implementation of AI data services in more vertical fields, the commercial value of Zhihu's “data gold mine” will continue to be re-evaluated, showing very definite long-term growth potential.
Looking at Zhihu's performance in the first half of 2026, this is not only a financial questionnaire showing management resilience amid macroeconomic uncertainty, but also a milestone in completing a systematic upgrade of its business model. From a strong profit base built by a high-quality community, to new growth points released during the entire IP life cycle operation, to the core barriers of “data gold mining” empowered by AI, Zhihu has successfully overcome the growth bottlenecks of traditional content platforms. More profoundly, the implementation of this series of strategies is completely reshaping Zhihu's capital market narrative. With the deep integration of AI data infrastructure and the operation of the entire IP industry chain, Zhihu's valuation logic is undergoing a fundamental shift from a single “Internet community” to an “AI data asset+IP operation platform”. We have reason to believe that as the value of its core assets continues to be revealed, Zhihu is entering a time of extremely definitive value revaluation, and its long-term growth space and commercial potential are worthy of fresh scrutiny and expectations from the capital market.