On August 26, Zhihu (02390.HK) released its second-quarter 2026 earnings report, showing total revenue of 690 million yuan for the quarter, a sequential increase of 5.9%. Following its first full-year non-GAAP profitability achievement in 2025, the company maintained non-GAAP profitability in the first half of 2026, with an adjusted net profit of 6.906 million yuan. The company's operational efficiency continued to improve, demonstrating strong business resilience.
During the second quarter, Zhihu kept refining its revenue mix while actively exploring AI-driven commercialization pathways. Revenue from paid content and IP operations reached 426 million yuan, accounting for 61.7% of total revenue; marketing services revenue came in at 199 million yuan, representing 28.8%; and other income, including expert data solutions, vocational education, and consumer products, totaled 65.2 million yuan, or 9.5%. As of the end of the quarter, Zhihu held cash and cash equivalents, time deposits, and short-term investments totaling 4.424 billion yuan.
Accelerating AI-Community Integration to Highlight the Value of Human Creation
On the operational front, Zhihu continues to reinforce its competitive edge built on the synergy of high-quality content, expert networks, and AI capabilities, with the distinct value of human-created content becoming even more prominent in the AI era. As of the end of the second quarter, Zhihu's cumulative content volume reached approximately 993 million items, up about 9% year-over-year, with AI-related professional content growing approximately 37% during the same period. Daily new high-quality content in the community grew over 16% year-over-year in the quarter, extending a trend of double-digit growth for multiple consecutive quarters.
Zhihu's network of experts and creators has also continued to expand. By the end of the second quarter, the platform had amassed 81.5 million content creators, a 3.1% increase year-over-year. In the first half of 2026, the number of honor-certified creators grew 9.8% year-over-year, reflecting the lasting appeal of the high-quality community ecosystem to professional creators. Notably, Academician Ben De, a laureate of the National Supreme Science and Technology Award and a pioneer in China's radar technology, along with mathematician Deng Yu, the first Chinese recipient of the Fields Medal, have both shared their professional insights and personal reflections on Zhihu. From college entrance exams and job hunting to scientific research, science communication, and learning creation, the professional discussions contributed by Zhihu's human creators are becoming a vital backbone for the efficient flow of high-quality information and knowledge in the AI era.
In parallel, Zhihu is accelerating the integration of AI into its community, using AI to better understand content, connect users, and unlock the value of the platform's long-accumulated content assets. AI capabilities have been further embedded into search, recommendation, content understanding, and distribution systems. The newly launched "AI Kanshan" feature is advancing community interactions toward an intelligent agent paradigm. Through the data open platform and the AI Works project plaza, which allows users to upload and showcase AI-generated works, Zhihu's user creation formats are becoming increasingly diverse. To date, AI Works has accumulated over 2,600 AI projects, and the data open platform has onboarded more than 17,600 professional developers, 20% of whom are new developers beyond Zhihu's existing creator base. Zhihu has also released a new version of its intelligent agent development tool, Zhihu CLI, further enhancing the convenience for developers to discover and utilize Zhihu content.
Stabilizing the Revenue Foundation and Unlocking AI Commercial Potential
In the second quarter, Zhihu's paid content and IP operations revenue reached 426 million yuan, up 4.4% year-over-year and 5.9% sequentially. Core paying user scale and payment intent remained stable, with an average of 13.11 million monthly subscribed members. The IP operations business sustained its high-growth trajectory, delivering significant increases in both copyright partnership volume and author copyright earnings: the number of copyright partnerships surged 671% year-over-year, while author copyright earnings climbed 620% year-over-year. Meanwhile, the IP operations of Yan Yan Stories are evolving from single copyright sales to multi-format, full-lifecycle development, further validating the influence and broad commercial potential of premium content across different industry formats.
As of the end of the second quarter, under the model combining Yan Yan Stories IP with Ting Hua Dao 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 human-style animation dramas adapted from Yan Yan Stories IP have each exceeded 900 million views, further underscoring the market appeal of Yan Yan Stories' high-quality IP.
In the marketing services segment, Zhihu generated 199 million yuan in second-quarter revenue, up 4% sequentially. The company continues to focus on industries such as technology, automotive, 3C home appliances, and gaming, which align closely with Zhihu's user profile and content strengths. Certain performance-based products, the gaming sector, and AI content asset businesses have already shown positive progress. Looking ahead, Zhihu will enhance the matching efficiency among professional content, user decision-making scenarios, and commercial products, further refining advertising products, algorithms, and delivery capabilities, while expanding into new scenarios such as AI content assets to boost conversion efficiency and per-unit traffic value through more precise commercial strategies.
AI is also opening new commercialization opportunities for Zhihu. Zhihu's expert data solutions, positioned as a Data Lab serving frontier model enhancement, offer large-model enterprises an integrated service covering requirement understanding, expert organization, data production, quality control, and model evaluation validation. In the first half of 2026, expert data solution projects have been implemented across multiple domains, including coding, search and deep research, visual reasoning, and intelligent agents. In the next phase, Zhihu will focus on validating the reusable value of these capabilities across different clients and model iterations, gradually extending toward solutions in data products, model evaluation, and complex task environments.
Zhou Yuan, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Zhihu, commented: "In the second quarter, our authentic, professional, and trustworthy community foundation remained resilient, with core user engagement depth staying stable and high-quality content and professional creators continuing to grow. AI is emerging as a new medium connecting users and content, propelling Zhihu's long-accumulated content, IP, and expert capabilities into broader application and commercial scenarios. Currently, new businesses are still in the commercialization validation phase. We will allocate resources based on real market demand, customer value, and return on investment, striving to stabilize core businesses while prudently validating the sustainability of new initiatives."
Wang Han, CFO of Zhihu, added: "In the second quarter, total revenue grew 5.9% sequentially, with the year-over-year decline further narrowing. Notably, paid content and IP operations achieved year-over-year growth, and expert data solutions completed initial commercial validation with project implementations across multiple model capability directions. We will continue to balance investments in key businesses with operational efficiency, persistently optimizing the revenue structure. At the same time, the company will maintain prudent capital allocation and continue executing share buybacks to create long-term value for shareholders."