Hidden Forces Behind Toutiao: China’s Content King: China, Growth, Consumer | Y Combinator
Toutiao, a news aggregator, has quickly become one of the top apps in China. Learn how it grew into its popularity and why users use it everyday more often than any other daily app.
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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