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The hidden forces behind China's content king Toutiao : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator

ycombinator.com · 3,927 words · saved by 1 readers

Using Machine and Deep Learning to Create and Serve Content, China’s Toutiao Created a Product with Engagement Similar to that of Social Networks - All without a Social Graph Toutiao, one of the flagship products of Bytedance*, may be the largest app you’ve never heard of–it’s like every news feed you read, YouTube, and TechMeme in one. Over 120M people in China use it each day. Yet what’s most interesting about Toutiao isn’t that people consume such varied content all in one place… it’s how Toutiao serves it up. Without any explicit user inputs, social graph, or product purchase history to rely on, Toutiao offers a personalized, high quality-content feed for each user that is powered by machine and deep learning algorithms. Going a step further than merely serving up content, Toutiao’s algorithms also create content: During the 2016 Olympics, a Toutiao bot wrote original news coverage, publishing stories on major events more quickly than traditional media outlets. The bot-written arti

Going a step further than merely serving up content, Toutiao’s algorithms also create content: During the 2016 Olympics, a Toutiao bot wrote original news coverage, publishing stories on major events more quickly than traditional media outlets. The bot-written articles enjoyed read rates (# of reads and # of impressions) in line with those produced at a slower speed and higher cost by human writers on average. The average user spends more than 74 minutes each day in Toutiao -- that’s more than the average user spends on Facebook1, and more than twice what they spend on Snapchat2. More than…

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