Logo of Tencent Holdings Limited seen on their booth on Big Data expo in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, China, 28 May 2018. EPA-EFE/Aleksandar Plavevski The investments could help Kuaishou and Baidu amass more content and fend off competition from ByteDance Inc., which is moving into search and drawing smartphone-savvy users to its popular short video and personalized news services. Through the financing, Baidu will add more than 100 million Zhihu Q&A posts to its main app, which is a combination of a search engine and news feed, Baidu said in a statement.
”We are all facing the same problem of an isolated island of information, and the cost of high-quality content is rising,” Zhihu Chief Executive Officer Zhou Yuan said on his own service after the investment was announced.
Founded by coder-turned-blogger Zhou, Zhihu has evolved over the past eight years to become one of China’s most reputable social media platforms, known for its high-quality Q&As on everything from films to football and foreign policy.
Zhihu is “recognized for its unique knowledge creation and sharing community,” Wang Lixing, a China Renaissance managing director, said in the statement. “The cooperation between Zhihu, Kuaishou and Baidu will create huge synergies and lay the foundation for long-term development.”
To contact the reporters on this story:
Zheping Huang in Hong Kong at zhuang245@bloomberg.net;
Lulu Yilun Chen in Hong Kong at ychen447@bloomberg.net