Zhihu Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Ji Hu Inc. Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2021 Financial Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Ms. Jingjing Du, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, ma'am.

Thank you, operator. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results conference call. Joining us today are Mr. Zhou Yuan, Chairman and CEO of Zhihu, Mr. Sun Wei, our CFO, and Mr. Neil Zhang, Head of Community Business Division and Strategic Development. Before we start, we would like to remind you that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements which involves a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results and outcomes may differ materially from those mentioned in today's announcement and this discussion. The company does not undertake any obligation to update this forward-looking information except as required by law. During today's call, management will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures for comparison purposes only. For definition of non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial results, please see the earnings release issued earlier today. In addition, a webcast replay of this conference call will be available on our website at ir.gu.com. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Sun Wei, our CFO. Okay.

Thank you, Jingjing. I am pleased to deliver today's opening remarks on behalf of Mr. Zhou Yuan, founder and CEO of Zhihu. Thank you for joining Zhihu's 2021 fourth quarter and full year earnings call. 2021 was a remarkable year for Zhihu. In March, we successfully completed our IPO amid a challenging market environment and went on to complete the year with sustained robust financial growth. Throughout the year, as part of our continued effort to enhance content quality, we focused on promoting and distributing fulfilling content, or content that we believe broadens horizons, provides solutions, and resonates with minds. Our visualization strategies proved to be effective and brought the diversity of Zhihu's content library to a new level. This enabled content creators to contribute with even greater levels of creativity and strengthen our capabilities to meet the growing content consumption needs of our users. We continue to benefit from our commitment to deliver fulfilling content and enhance our operating efficiency, realizing another year of strong user-based growth and a more appealing content ecosystem for business partners. In Q4, our user base reached a new high in the fourth quarter, with average MAU exceeding 100 million and a year-over-year increase of 36.4%. Our content-centric monetization approach maintained its robust growth momentum with revenue in Q4 increasing by 96.1% year-over-year to RMB 1.02 billion, and the revenue for the full year increasing by 118.9% to RMB 2.96 billion. And the contribution of non-advertising business increased to 62.9% in Q4. At the same time, our average monthly paying members for Q4 further increased, by 102% year-over-year to 6.1 million, and accounted for 5.9% of total MEUs. We believe these achievements are the result of not only the successful implementation of our content-centric growth strategy, but also the joint efforts of all the parties in the Zhihu community. Throughout the year, we relentlessly strive to enhance the quality of the Zhihu content through better understanding of our content creators and deeper comprehension of the Zhihu content. And we focused on promoting and distributing fulfilling content, or the content that we believe broadens horizons, provides solutions, and resonates with minds. This high standard has not only been the benchmark for our diverse content library, but also the cornerstone of the long-term development of the Zhihu community. As of the end of Q4, The cumulative pieces of content on our platform had reached 419 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 39%, of which the number of questions and answers increased to 420 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 33.8%. As of the end of Q4, the average daily production of fulfilling content has increased fourfold compared to when we first launched the algorithm to promote fulfilling content. In 2021, we also adopted a scenario-oriented content operating strategy to further diversify our content offerings. With this in mind, we deepened and refined our operations based on the differentiated consumption demands of various communities across the important calendar events throughout the year. These included seeking answers from science, China's youth day, and the college entrance examination in the first half of the year. Followed by the Tokyo Olympics, the autumn employment season, the 100,000 Ys, the Nobel Prize, the 2021 Zhihu Top 100 list, and the year-end reviewing in the second half of the year. As a result, in Q4, the consumption percentage of fulfilling content in our cornerstone fields and other categories, including education, increased by 3% compared to the same period last year. This demonstrates that Zhihu's fulfilling content is resonating with students and young people in a way that meets their evolving demands for self-development and lifestyle content. According to our recent user survey, over 90% of the monthly active users on Zhihu platform have a strong appreciation for fulfilling content. The enhanced recognition and content consumption coupled with the simulated creating activities sustainably throughout the rapid growth of our content-centric ecosystem. We seek to become a popular destination for timely content, inviting in-depth discussion of trending events, which further encourages a high level of content creation and user engagement. It is also an important category that is well-suited to address the demands of users aged about 30 and helped successfully drive our organic user growth. As of the end of December, the number of users for timely content consumption remained about 40% of total TAUs. Browsing trending event on Zhuhu has gradually become second nature for our users. In the fourth quarter, multidimensional and insightful discussions covering major international affairs, social news, and topics related to people's livelihoods were generated quickly on Zhihu, creating timely content for users. These questions generated tens of thousands of answers and more than 100 million page views, along with millions of user interactions. During this Winter Olympics, Zhihu users have defended our title of the Master of Skills and Tactics in Chinese, which gained from the Tokyo Olympics. And we continue to provide professional, timely, and broad-based fulfilling content across various formats. Questions like, what are the highlights of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics opening ceremony? And which shows impressed you most? Motivated the answer directly from the opening ceremony operation team, including Director Zhang Yimou himself. And they received close to 40 million page views and 100,000 upvotes within a few hours from users. In 2022, we will continue to iterate our timely content recommendation algorithm and the related products to better meet the diverse consumption needs of our users. During 2021, we further integrated video content into our vibrant ecosystem through expanding the library of video-lized answers, providing tools to facilitate text-to-video or joint video creation, In the fourth quarter, the average number of monthly uploaded videos on Zhuhu and the number of video creators increased by 211% and 32%, respectively, compared to the same period last year. Meanwhile, the number of DAUs who consumed videos continued to increase and exceeded 45% in Q4. In Q4, we held Zhuhu's first highly-voted joint creation competition. Less than four weeks, more than 4,000 content creators participated in the competition. From using the authorized 2 million pieces of high-quality graphics and text content in our library, more than 2,000 original video submissions were produced and received. These works covered dozens of diverse topics, including science, history, career, psychology, and extremely imaginative ideas and received over 200 million views. We firmly believe that a healthy content ecosystem is one that revolves around creators and fully supports creator engagement across multiple formats. Moving forward, we will continue to upgrade our products and business strategies and optimize our organization structure as needed to further encourage creation activities. Along with our initiative to further broaden the coverage of fulfilling content on the Zhihu platform, we have upheld community culture through proactive upgrading of the community governance system. In Q4, we strengthened our ability to identify non-compliant content and accounts involving cyberbullying, rumor-mongering, incitement, and violence against children. We dealt with more than 4.6 million pieces of non-compliant content and suspended more than 15,000 accounts. Moving forward, we will continue to uphold our social responsibility, ensuring that the community culture of sincerity, expertise, and respect is maintained for our long-term growth. Our user base continues its rapid growth rate, driven by our healthy and more diverse content-centric ecosystem. In Q4, The average monthly MAUs on the Zhihu platform reached 103.3 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 36.4%. Our average monthly paying members reached 6.1 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 102%. And our average monthly viewers increased by 7.4% year-over-year. We have a math. a fast-growing, diverse, and highly engaged user base. Currently, the vast majority of users are under the age of 30. While users from second- and lower-tier cities accounted for 52% of our user base, the female users accounted for 47% of it. It is worth mentioning that the organic growth of new users continues to maintain a significant proportion in Q4. Also, our efforts in refining operation efficiency further accelerated the consumption in the related verticals, including baby care and the lifestyles, and also boosted the growth of our core users aged in the 30 years old and above. It is encouraging to see that the DAU to MAU ratio in the fourth quarter remained steady, along with the rapid user growth, and the average monthly engagement increased on a year-over-year basis. Creators are one of the most important participants in our community. They not only flourish the community with high-quality content by sharing their knowledge, experience, and insights, but also gain inspiration, respect, and recognition from the community by interacting with other users. Thus, in 2021, we supported creators by improving their experience within the community, launching a series of tools and functions and upgrading incentive plans for them. For example, we made several upgrades to the follow function, including an independent tab, in order to support creators to better attract and interact with followers. As a result, we see a significant rise of average new followers per creator. The one-click PPC generation and the joint creation function enabled creators to utilize a more convenient video creation experience. In addition, our refined operations tailored for different levels of creators effectively encouraged their engagement and the multi-genre creation. Thanks to these initiatives, we saw steady increase in both the average daily activities of the high level content creators and their high quality productions in Q4. We also saw a rising inspiration and encouraged interactions among creators within the community. In 2021, We took great efforts to strengthen our ability to attract new content creators. In the rediscovery sincerity campaign held in Q4, more than 100 annual Zhihu content creators in Chinese were selected from various fields, including science, lifestyle, social sciences, humanities, fashion, and psychology. Moving to 2022, we will continue to provide effective and professional support to the creators based on their own needs and specialties. At the same time, we will further encourage the production from new creators and continue to improve their retention rates. By fostering both existing and new creators, we are confident and excited to inject even more vitality into our community ecosystem and provide multi-scenario content-centric solutions to our brand partners. In spite of many uncertainties in the macroeconomy during 2021, we have focused on building a high-quality, content-centric ecosystem as the foundation for our healthy and long-term business development. Our total revenue for 2021 reached RMB 2.96 billion, representing a year-over-year increase of 118.9%, while our underlying revenue structure was further improved and optimized. As a percentage of revenue, non-advertising revenue further grew to 60.8% in 2021 from 37.6% in 2020, of which content commerce solutions revenue for the year increased to 32.9% from 10% in 2020. Our paid membership business remained stable and accounted for 22.6% of our total revenue in 2021. And other revenue which primarily contributed by e-commerce and the vocational training related business increased by 196.3% year-over-year to RMB 155.9 million. In 2021, we have further improved our commercial content ecosystem through the following steps. The first step was to solidify the infrastructure of the commercial content by launching our chief platform and connecting content creators with business partners we helped creators to improve their own monetization capabilities while satisfying the marketing demands of business customers all the way from brand building to actual transaction conversion. Other tools like Toast and Youshu were launched to further improve the efficiency of commercial content creation so as to further encourage content production. As of the end of December 2021, The total number of content creators who generate financial income through our content and commerce solutions exceeded 15,000. Secondly, we helped build the content pool for brands and merchants. Through a series of brand content marketing campaigns, such as Auto Lab, Curiosity Lab, and Jihoo's Top 100 list, we assisted our business partners in guiding their customers along the journey from brand name awareness to decision making, and finally, gaining user trust and sustaining business growth. In 2021, our advertising revenues achieved a yearly growth rate of 37.7%. Furthermore, we continue to explore various potential vertical content ecosystems to elevate Zhuhu's overall commercialization capabilities. Vocational training is one of them. Its related content on Zhihu platform is perfectly matched to the demands from core users aged from 18 to 36 years old. We call it the second 18 years of life, indicating a huge potential commercialization opportunity. Moving forward, we will continue to improve our technical capabilities to develop more user-favored paid educational courses and related content by leveraging the advantage of our Zhihu brand. On top of rapid revenue growth, we also continue to improve our operational efficiency by adopting a smart and rational planning strategy and a continuous technology improvement plan. We can achieve both quality and effective customer acquisition and further develop our commercial ecosystem by leveraging our abundant user base and a solid technical infrastructure. Our acquisition costs Per additional MAU for full year 2021 was approximately RMB 60, which remains relatively low compared to the whole industry. In 2022, we will continue to recruit excellent R&D talent as we work to improve our recommendation algorithm, strengthen the construction of our data system, and solidify the technical foundation that drives the ongoing development of our community. Meanwhile, we will further enhance Zhihu's brand name awareness by creating powerful IPs, such as an adventurous evening with answers in Chinese, an annual Zhihu content creator ceremony, to achieve our goals across brand building and high-quality user growth. As of December 2021, cash and cash equivalent term deposits and short-term investments were RMB $7.4 billion, which gives us strong financial resilience to power our future development. Stepping into 2022, through prioritizing the healthy development of our community and adhering to our fulfilling content standard, we will be able to further improve the experience for users and creators and inject our whole community with both trustworthiness and a sense of belonging. For example, Following the improvement of products and functions across training topics, top searches, live streaming, and videos, users were able to enjoy a better consumption experience for timely content. Here is another case for content related to the Winter Olympics and the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war, where high-quality discussions were aggregated across various formats, including graphic and text, live streaming, and videos. allowing users to consume content according to their own preferences. We committed to further upgrading our recommendation algorithm to ensure that fulfilling content can be introduced to users more accurately. On our creator community side, we will enhance our initiatives to refine operational efficiency to help creators achieve their goals, both in user recognition and financial income. we believe a healthy and vibrant community will lead to more efficient and organic user-based growth. In addition to the above, we will continue to explore more commercialization opportunities within vast verticals in our content library and among our users' diverse and varied demands. Our emerging vocational training business is a good example, which can help us to both further diversify our business ecosystem and contribute to drive our long-term growth. 2022 may prove not to be an easy year. However, we believe that we are all well-prepared and in a better position for the journey. As we continue to unlock the value of our unique content-centric ecosystem and benefit from growing scale, we will continue to enhance our operating efficiency, the financial health, as well as fulfill our responsibilities to the society. This about concludes the remarks of Mr. Zhou Yuan. I will now talk you through our Q4 financial performance in a little more detail. As discussed, we achieved another solid quarter of performance in Q4 2021 despite the unpredictable headwinds. In the fourth quarter, we recorded our total revenue of RMD 1.02 billion, representing a 96.1% year-over-year increase. This increase benefited from our very unique content-centric business model. Our fulfilling content library was further expanded and diversified in Q4. This contributed to the continuous prosperity of our community and also to the sustained growth of our user base. Our average MAUs reached 103.3 million in the quarter, representing a year-over-year increase of 36.4%. Worthy of note in Q4 2021, our non-advertising business, which mainly includes our content commerce solutions and paid membership, enjoyed accelerated growth, contributing 62.9% to the total revenue in Q4, compared to the 38.6% in the same period last year. This demonstrated not only the remarkable success of our content-centric monetization model, but also the scalability of our content commerce solutions, as well as the robust growth in demand for our other services, such as paid membership and vocational training. In Q4, the revenue contribution of our content commerce solutions increased to RMB 367.3 million, representing a year-over-year increase of 380.2%. Our client base of CCS became more diversified compared to the same period in 2020, We are also excited to see that more and more content creators are empowered by our diversified commercial platform and the tools such as Chief Platform. As of the end of Q4, the number of content creators who have joined our Chief Platform nearly increased 50% compared to the number in Q3. Our paid membership contributed RMB 208.8 million to total revenue in the quarter. representing an increase of 100% compared to the same period last year. At the end of Q4, our average monthly paying members reached 6.1 million, with a paying ratio of 5.9%. The robust growth rate of this business line was solidly underpinned by the increasing vitality within our creator community. Meanwhile, our advertising business achieved solid growth in Q4, despite of the weaker market. In this quarter, advertising revenue recorded RMB 377.8 million, representing a 18.4% year-over-year increase, of which the display-based advertising grabbed a greater percentage. Revenue from e-commerce, internet services, FMCG, consumer electronics, and vocational training were the top five contributors, bolstered by our diversified content library and highly engaged community. Our advertisers find it is natural and effective to guide their targeted customers during the whole decision-making process and to build brand trust in the long term. Other revenue, mainly comprising of vocational training and e-commerce, achieved year-over-year growth of 230.5% in Q4, increasing to RMB 65.4 million. It is worth mentioning that our vocational training business had a very strong quarter and achieved multiple times year-over-year growth. Stepping into 2022, by leveraging Zhuhu's deep understanding of users' needs and our brand name recognition, combined with further increased operation efficiency, we believe these new business lines will be able to continue to achieve strong growth momentum. As a UGC-based content platform, we enjoyed the benefits of having a healthy gross margin of 47.1% in the first quarter and 52.5% for the full year. Meanwhile, we have been investing in building a healthy content ecosystem in order to broaden and enhance content offerings for all of our users. However, we will be very conscious of maintaining high efficiency on our cost structure. Our total operating expenses of RMB 855.1 million declined as a percentage of total revenue on both a year-over-year basis and a quarter-over-quarter basis. Our operating expenses in the quarter were primarily composed of sales and marketing expenses and the investment in human resources. Driven by the abundant content coverage and the diverse content formats of the Zhihu platform, the organic growth of new users continued in Q4. and effectively promoted the healthy and long-term development of the Zhihu community as a whole. As a result of all the above, our non-GAAP adjusted net loss, which primarily excludes share-based composition expenses, was RMB 240.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2021. While focusing on improving our cash flow management as of December 2021, the company had cash and cash equivalent term deposits and a short-term investment of RMB 7.4 billion, compared with RMB 3.1 billion on December 2020. So I will conclude with our overall financial outlook. Looking to the first quarter of 2022, the company expects total revenue to be in the range of RMB 720 million to RMB 740 million. Please do note, however, that the above outlook reflects Juhu's current and the preliminary estimates, and it may be subject to change. Okay. This concludes our prepared remarks.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed, and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question comes from Yan Yan Zhao with CICC. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Guan. Congratulations on your performance. I have two questions. The first one is, Thanks management. And I have two questions. And first one is about how does the management think of the strategic direction of the company in 2022? And the second question is regarding the content ecosystem, especially for the content creator side and for the commercialization. So what are the potential enforcements in the 2022 banks?

Hello, thank you very much for your question. I'm Zhou Yuan, the CEO of QiHu. Let me answer your question. First of all, in the past year, that is, in 2021, our sense of achievement and the improvement of the media in terms of content have achieved gradual results. These two things will still be very important this year. Thank you very much. This is the answer from CEO Mr. Zhou Yuan. First of all, in the year of 2021, we have made some concrete achievements at the current stage.

in terms of content, sense of acquisition, sense of fulfillment, as well as medium upgrades. And based on this foundation, we will put our strategic focus for the year of 2022 to ecology first.

The growth of user data and the growth of income behind this data, there are more important things that will become our top-level tasks. For example, the experience of the creator, the reputation of the consumer, and the satisfaction of the community atmosphere. These indicators will now become the first evaluation standards to test our results.

What do I mean by ecology first? Well, first of all, it means that there are things that we have to accomplish on top of the user number increase and also revenue number increase. What is more important and higher up on the top of our hierarchy are the experiences of content creators, the word of mouth of consumers, as well as the satisfaction level of the community atmosphere. All of these factors that I mentioned will be a test to whether or not we have done our good job. And of course, the numeric or KPIs are also very important and will try to also hit those targets and also reduce the loss for the year.

Secondly, in terms of products and operations, we will use the energy of the community to think and set our work goals from this perspective. I know that I have reported to you before that a good ecosystem should meet a few points.

Second, in terms of the product and operations that we have, we'll try to unleash the full volatility of the community that we built. In this perspective, as I said before, a good ecosystem focuses on a couple of things. First is multi-forms of medium and multi-forms of monetization. And the third is end-to-end. And I will elaborate a little bit more in detail.

OK.

By multiple format of mediums, I meant that by using different mediums, we'll be able to cater for different needs of our users in different scenarios. It's just like having a dinner, you have Malta, you have, you know, a fast dish, an appetizer, and then the main course, and then followed with some dessert at the end.

Okay. OK.

By multiple ways of monetization, I mean today, the creator population, they're a diversified group of population. And we, as a platform, we have to be adaptive to cater for their needs and experiences rather than having the creators coming to us and adapting to our platform.

And last but not least, by end-to-end, I mean we have multiple types of creators at different levels, and we would want to make sure that our platform

is running efficiently and quickly so as to create a closed loop for those creators to be able to finish their contributions and make money. So according to these three key factors that I just mentioned, we do have a lot of room for further upgrades.

So those of you who are familiar with the product should know that we had a lot of changes last year. In this, we actually have a lot of learning. This year, we are planning to reduce the difficulty of creation and improve the experience of consumption. We want this to replace our products. At the same time, we will also be very determined to continue to create creators who have a sense of accomplishment. To be determined to clean up resources. OK.

If you know Jihoo well, you may notice already that we have made quite a lot of changes to our product last year. And through this process, we have also got quite a lot of learnings. And this year, our plan is to further reduce the level of difficultness for the content creators and also to increase the consumer experiences to have further iterations of our product. And also at the same time, we'll try to continue to allocate more resources to those who continuously creating contents that are bringing higher sense of fulfillment.

The third point I want to make is that everybody knows that only by having healthy commercial products could we be able to have continuous

revenue and create genuinely valuable, useful values. And as you can see that we have a very nice CCS, impressive performance on CCS. And around CCS this year, there are many, many more, you know, changes to production to come in the year of 2022.

We started to develop our training layout more actively in terms of professional education. This is an area where our community ecosystem can be deeply coordinated. We actually found the need for this scale from the content and users in the community. No matter it is around the upgrade of professional skills, various kinds of tests, Okay.

The last point I want to make is that we had already forked out our business in vocational training this year due to the belief that we think it's a good supplementary to our ecosystem. We just discovered that the demand for taking exams and having vocational training is really huge, and the size is quite large. And therefore, we will have some more progress to be made in vocational training by working with our education partners this year. So as I said before, ecology first is our overall strategy, and we believe that by implementing this strategy well, we will have improved the numbers for years to come. And I will direct the second question to Neil Zhang.

Okay. Thank you, host. I'm Zhang Ning, and I'm in charge of community business. Regarding the work of creators, I will talk about it in four aspects. First, in the first aspect, we will focus on the creators of community originals. This is Niu Jiang, the chief strategy officer responsible for the community. So for the content creators and sense of fulfilling, we will focus on the content creators, especially the original content creators,

by giving them better creation tools through our product and our technology, and to support them to have multimedia formats of expression so as to help them work better. Okay.

Second is about the traffic and benefits.

benefit innovation schemes, especially for those who are with us for the longer time in the cornerstone areas. We would have some new schemes in terms of benefits in order to supplement with the cheese system and Yen Plus system that we already have so as to benefit those creators with better traffic and better monetization.

The third aspect is the sense of achievement of the content that we proposed last year. This year, we have completed a relatively large algorithm upgrade. Now, we understand the content more and understand the ability of the creator. Therefore, we can bring an efficiency improvement from the attack to the distribution of the whole chain. For creators of different fields and different levels, users and content distribution algorithms can form different exchanges. As to the standard of sense of fulfillment, we had already completed the preliminary algorithm for that, and we have deeper understanding as to the content and capacity of our content creators.

so that we'll be able to have a higher efficiency and a better control of cost in terms of the supply of contents all the way up to the distribution of the content. And for those content creators from different areas and at different levels, we'll be able to create sorts of better areas of communication through our algorithm improved so that we'll have both squares and also clubs.

Last but not least, as our CEO Zhou Yuan mentioned, our core strategy this year is ecology first. So we will focus on the creators of the community, and then around our original value standards. So this year, we will continue to encourage our creators to share more and better content.

By way of summary, just as our CEO said, we will continue to have ecology first and continue to help our content creators to support them for their content creations and to give them some very nice mechanization mechanism.

OK.

Are we ready for the next questioner?

Yes, please.

Thank you. The next question comes from Natalie Wu with Haitong International. Please go ahead.

Hello, I'm Natalie Wu. This is my question. I mainly want to ask about advertising. I want to know about the current point of view of the entire advertising industry. 那从之后的这个角度出发 对这几个广告的形式 包括像传统的这个品牌广告 效果广告 还有咱们这个CCS的一个观察 以及今年的一个趋势的一个判断 然后从现在这个时间点来看呢 今年咱们觉得哪些行业的一个广告组 会比较给力 哪些人会拖后腿 以及这个之后在这个广告组上头的一个 就业务的一个 So just check in myself briefly. So good evening, management. Thanks for taking my question. My question is related about the online advertising platform. industry, the updated view on advertising from your perspective. So just wondering what's the latest trend and outlook for the online advertising industry in China, and more specifically for traditional brand ads, performance-based ads, and CGS, etc.? ? Um, also, uh, for the specific industry, um, in terms of the, um, uh, the other types of, uh, just wondering, um, any particular, um, particularly stronger or weaker on a yearly basis from your perspective of you and, um, how, how's your exposure for that? And, uh, also in terms of the, uh, four year, of 2022, how should we think about your goals for the advertising business, also the CCS? Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hi, Natalie. Can you hear me? I'm sorry. After you asked the question, our network might have some problems, so it's off. I'll answer it again. Regarding the overall view of the advertising industry last year, we actually observed two more obvious trends. The first trend is the uncertainty of Hongguan's economy, politics and supervision. Indeed, it has a big negative impact on the entire sales budget of customers. As a result, in the past few seasons, the total increase in sales budget has been a clear decline. This is the first point we observed. The second point is that we see that the structure of the sales budget of customers has also undergone major adjustments. More and more sales budgets Thank you very much, Natalie, for your question.

We actually have made two observations in terms of online advertisements recently. First is because of the uncertainties around the macroeconomy, the politics, as well as the regulation. The general environment indeed has made some negative impact on our clients' marketing budget. In the past couple of quarters, you see that the total size of their marketing budget probably dropped quite a lot. And the second is that we noticed that there is a major structural change to the marketing budget of our clients. More and more marketing budget is switching from traditional media platform towards content platforms that has better and higher qualities for content, including content community like us. Therefore, our clients, they focus more and more on making long-term investment in building their brands and also to make accumulations of high-quality content assets. And during this switching or shift of structural budget shifts, content community, high-quality content community like Zhuhu, we are actually benefiting from this trend.

Okay. Okay. So, based on these two observations, in the past year, we found that our own GCF plus advertising, in this way, to get the customer's market budget and sales cost, in this way, the income of the marketing budget maintained a very high rate of growth. In these two parts, the income added up, we saw that last year's annual growth rate was 118%, and Q4's annual growth rate was 88%. Okay.

So against this backdrop, we see that CCS plus advertisement as a model for us is giving us very nice growth. For instance, year-on-year growth for the whole year 21 increased by 180%, and fourth quarter year-on-year increase was 88%. Okay.

Okay. Structure-wise, we see advertisement is still the number one source of revenue we had. In Q4, we had a faster growth rate than the industry average, and for the whole year, we reached around 40% in advertisement increase. In terms of advertising revenue, from the stage point of view, the increase in brand ads is faster. In terms of the whole year, it is close to 50%. And the ratio in advertising revenue is directly increasing. From the perspective of the industry distribution of advertisers, we can see that the increase in e-commerce, fast sales, and 3D digital buying, as well as in cars, is very significant. This is also due to the content field that has its own characteristics. These two directions are also closer to users. These few directions are also closer to users' consumption scenarios and consumption decisions. This is from the stage point of view.

In terms of the brand advertisement, we see that it's growing even faster at about 50% for the whole year, and as a percentage to total online advertisement revenue, it is also growing and getting a bigger part. In terms of verticals, we see e-commerce, FMCG, 3C Electronics, and automobiles are growing very significantly, which is very unique and characteristic to Zhihu, because we believe that these two areas, they are closer to the consuming scenarios of the users and also closer to people's consuming decision point.

从CCS这个收入来看, 目前仍然是最大的一个收入的增长引擎, 整个四季度增长。 CCS is still the biggest driver for growth. In Q4, increased by four times, and for the whole year, about six times. CCS is highly scalable, and it is highly growth-oriented. I believe that this has been proven true. From the point of view of the creators, the launch of the knowledge platform has greatly accelerated the scale of the entire CCS business income. From the end of the fourth quarter, the number of creators who have entered the knowledge platform has reached 15,000.

In terms of the content creators, by using the Cheese platform, they entered into our ecosystem for CCS and be able to scale up more significantly and meaningfully so that they can have a better income. By the end of the fourth quarter, the total number on Cheese platform is 15,000 creators.

We are benefiting with better and better word of mouth in terms of the CCS. We are seeing both the number of brands and merchants

working with us on the rise. Vertically, we see e-commerce and personal care are the two biggest verticals, whereas internet service and vocational training are showcasing very nice driving force.

如果我们综合看广告加上BCS这两大收入条件, 那从行业来看, 电商,网服,快销,汽车,IT3C, So overall speaking, for both advertisement and CCS,

We have e-commerce, 3C, vocational, and gaming. All of those categories put together accounting for 80% plus of the total advertisement revenue. And then the e-commerce, internet service, automobile, and 3Cs, quarter on quarter, they registered a growth rate ranging between 20% to 60%. So that's very impressive. Mm-hmm.

For the year 2022, Q1, we thought that the growth will be over 50% year on year.

And for the whole year, we expect it to be 60% to 65%, which will be higher than the industry average.

Okay. 我不知道这个是不是已经回答了Natalie所有的问题。 对,是。 今年整一年的一期outlook的话, 现在是不是能够有一个比较好的一个体验?

in terms of the four-year goals?

In terms of the four-year goals? In terms of the four-year goals? CCS should be the largest. It should be close to 1% or more.

Got it.

Got it. For the whole year outlook, we're talking about 60% to 65% growth, which will be higher than the industry average. And in terms of contributor size, CCS will be probably the biggest contributor by taking up about one-third of the total. following up with, you know, advertisement and paid membership also on the rise.

Are you ready for the next question, please? Thank you. The next question comes from Steve Gu with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Zhou, Mr. Chen, Mr. Niu, Mr. Jin. This is my question. I would like to ask a question about the education business. I understand that this business is still in the early stages. I would like to ask the management to communicate with us and talk about how to continue to produce competitive education products. We have already discussed the content. How do we cooperate with other institutions? Okay, I'll briefly translate myself. Thanks, Manjun, for taking my questions. So I have one question on behalf of Future for Bayi regarding our vocational education. So I understand that this business is still at the nascent stage, but could management share with us some high-level thoughts in terms of how to actually manufacture or create high-quality educational content on a sustainable basis? So except for the content that's already on our platform, how would we actually cooperate with our industry partners? Is that going to be done through M&A or? Is it going to be created by our partners, and then we'll be the publisher of this education content? And last but not least, could you please share with us some of the data points, such as the flow profile, the revenue mix, as well as the market cut? Thank you.

Okay, I'm Zhou Yan. Thank you very much. I think this is a very good question. I'll start with what we see, which is some of the real needs of the community. Then I will share my thoughts. I will add more details later. In fact, in the community, there is a good middle and high-level professional education, and even a system that encourages the relevant people. This system is very important. the real demand, and then the accumulation. I remember I was probably in, I forget which time, in this sharing, I also told everyone that we now have more than 1 million users in the daily consumption test content, that is, DAU. The frequency and density of users in terms of consumption content is very, Answer from CEO Zhou Yuan.

Well, actually, for the vocational training business, in our mind, we believe that this is a real demand generated genuinely within the community as we see it over the years. And we see that there is a mid-to-long-term education system that is gradually taking shape in our community from the demands generated from our users. By way of example, in our master's examination part, we see an active DAU of about 1 million or even higher than 1 million. So the demand is real and huge. 刚才我说的这个内容体系呢,它其实我们经过梳理发现,比如说各种

uh, uh, uh, uh, Okay.

As I said before, the content system that we see in our system, we think that the people who are very active if we want to pursue a professional certificate and use it as a forum to talk to like-minded people. And they also talk about their hobbies, their skills, and how they can achieve a certificate or improve their skills in our community. So we could provide greater support to those people based on our content.

In my opinion, We believe that our community that we have built already is a very good platform in order to generate an ecosystem specifically for education.

And community can serve as an entrance for people to take up, you know, the content with regard to education that they required.

I'm Sun Wei.

I'll add a few data about education that may help Steve better understand our business. This education business actually grew very quickly in 2021. We can see from the results that the whole year's sales achieved more than Okay.

From CFO, Mr. Sun Wei. In terms of numbers, education or vocational training in 2021, the size increased by five times year on year. And in terms of percentage, it's still rather small at the beginning, so we put that under the category of other income. However, in the year of 2021, in Q1, we saw that increasing to more than 5%. And for the longer term, we believe that they have a potential of taking up about 20% of our total revenues.

In terms of content coverage, we have covered many SKUs in the two fields of exam and skill training. For example, in the exam field, we have covered exams and even public exams. In the skill training field, we have CFA, CPA, FRM, professional language training, including writing skills, interest, and so on.

In terms of types of product or categories of product that we have developed for training, in terms of exam, we have master's entry examination. We have civil servant examination in China. We also cover different types of professional skills, such as CFA or CPA or FRM. We also have business English training or writing skills training.

At the same time, from the infrastructure, we have also completed the entire education center of Zhihu. From the organization of production and distribution of relevant education fields, as well as the transformation of customers, including the conversion, we have basically completed the entire CRM system of education. In the future, whether it is to integrate Zhihu's own education courses or to integrate our education partners, we can complete this process very quickly.

In terms of the infrastructure building, we had already completed the mid-office required for Zhihu education. For instance, we have this CRM education system that will be able to cover the whole value point from content creation and the distribution of content. So in the future, either we can run it ourselves, operate it ourselves, or we can acquire a partner and very quickly and efficiently incorporate the business into our own system as an infrastructure.

Okay. 然后具体回答刚才Steven那个问题, 我们现在所有的教育的课程都是EP, 目前还没有3P的课程, 当然未来我们并不排除这个接入其他的business partner的可能性, 但目前现状是基本是以EP为主。

And also specifically to Steven's question before, all the courses that we have for the time being are 1P instead of 3P, but maybe there will be 3Ps in the future.

Thank you. That concludes today's question and answer session. At this time, I will turn the conference back to Jingjing Du for any closing or additional remarks.

Thank you, operator. Thank you all again for joining us today. And if you have any further questions, please contact our IR team directly or TPG Investor Relations. Thank you.

Thank you. The conference has ended. You may disconnect your line.