Zhihu Inc. Achieves Historic Milestone: First-Ever Full-Year Non-GAAP Profit in 2025
On March 25, 2026, Zhihu Inc. announced its fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results, marking a significant milestone for the company.
In 2025, Zhihu achieved its first-ever full-year non-GAAP profit, reaching RMB 37.9 million. This historic achievement validates the company's strategic transformation and underscores the structural durability of its operational leverage.
The company's community engagement continues to thrive, with average daily time spent per user increasing to over 41 minutes on the platform in Q4 2025. Zhihu's ecosystem of trusted creators remains vibrant, consistently delivering authentic and high-quality content across diverse fields.
At the same time, the company accelerated AI integration within its community, leveraging the synergistic evolution of high-quality content, expert networks, and AI capabilities to strengthen its competitive moat in the AI era.
Zhihu's business structure was optimized in 2025, with a healthier commercial ecosystem driving a double-digit sequential increase in marketing services revenue. The company is now poised to scale AI-driven commercialization, including rapidly building industry-leading expert data solutions and deploying AI productivity tools to accelerate IP monetization of its Yanyan Stories franchise.
The initiatives are anchored by a robust self-sustaining ecosystem, with powerful synergies between high-quality content, expert networks, and expanding AI capabilities driving heightened community activity and interaction. Daily engagement metrics strengthened significantly in Q4 2025, with average daily time spent per user increasing sharply year-over-year and sequentially to over 41 minutes.
High-quality content on the platform continues to surge, with daily creation of high-quality content rising by over 20% year-over-year and contributing to over 31% growth for the full year. Professional AI-related content increased by over 30% year-over-year, solidifying Zhihu's position as a leading forum for prominent researchers and frontline engineers to share insights and debate key issues.
Zhihu remains at the vanguard of the AI revolution, hosting extensive high-level discussions on key topics such as DeepSeek's Mixture-of-Experts architecture, Qwen's NeurIPS winning mechanisms, and the continuous iterations of Kimi and Zhipu.
