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Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

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Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#31

Post by hasenj »

adventured wrote: post #27
wmeredith wrote: post #12

Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh.

"Toutiao is on pace to pull in about $2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising." If the media landscape isn't well organized across such a large society, or particularly when you have a massive new audience to introduce to news systems (China has gained what, 600 million new regular Internet users in the last seven years?), there's an amplified benefit to aggregation / managing all of that informati…

I think the sigh is about top talent being used for ads instead of something more fundamental to the advancement of technology, such as AI for things more significant like vision and language translation, etc.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#33

Post by kalasoo »

Toutiao is more than just a news aggregation app, it's a huge interest mining and data recommendation system. Moreover, the company expands its services to mobile video sharing platform and many other fields so as to collect more dimensional data of users. --- In my opinion, ByteDance is a data/intelligence company and Toutiao is just a great app to adopt the technology and grow fast. So, we look forward to seeing an even brighter future of it, which might be able to leverage the market.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#35

Post by chrisweekly »

closeparen wrote: post #20
shamdasani wrote: post #4

The desire for more often blinds us. We all are looking for more wealth, and perhaps working for a startup like this will get us there. However, I personally think that talent is priceless. You can't just throw money for top skill. In field like startups, you have to passionate on what you're working on to make it the best it can be. Sure, say I have "top talent". But, what we fail to realize that "top talent" may no…

Does anyone actually believe in adtech? Are people truly passionate about social media monetization? Most signaling about passion is transparent bullshit. For a first pass: do the people you hire apply exclusively to you and your competitors? No? Then they aren't passionate about your company's mission. At least, not any more passionate than the they are about the missions of the other companies they would have worke…

Good points.

I recall a compelling RSA animate video about motivation and job satisfaction, which distilled their factors down to just three: mastery, autonomy, and purpose.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#36

Post by synicalx »

shamdasani wrote: post #4

The desire for more often blinds us. We all are looking for more wealth, and perhaps working for a startup like this will get us there. However, I personally think that talent is priceless. You can't just throw money for top skill. In field like startups, you have to passionate on what you're working on to make it the best it can be. Sure, say I have "top talent". But, what we fail to realize that "top talent" may no…

> You can't just throw money for top skill.

There comes a point when you're offered so much money that you're not motivated by the thing that you're doing but rather by the performance bonus you're trying to earn, or by the amount you're going to increase the share price by.

Does that lead to the same outcome as having a very passionate person instead? Maybe, maybe not, but if you're peddling advertising you probably haven't got much else to offer people other than money.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#37

Post by adventured »

hasenj wrote: post #31
adventured wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Toutiao is on pace to pull in about $2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising." If the media landscape isn't well organized across such a large society, or particularly when you have a massive new audience to introduce to news systems (China has gained what, 600 million new regular Internet users in the last seven years?), there's an amplified benefit to aggregation / managing all of that informati…

I think the sigh is about top talent being used for ads instead of something more fundamental to the advancement of technology, such as AI for things more significant like vision and language translation, etc.

What's more valuable than building a top notch system for delivering news (and everything that tends to go with that) to a billion people?

A very large number of engineers were dedicated to building out the radio and television technology platforms over decades. Was it all just to deliver ads? Trivial then right? Well that's what paid for a lot of it. It delivered community, it delivered news, it delivered entertainment, it connected people to the rest of their nation.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#39

Post by kalasoo »

kalasoo wrote: post #33

Toutiao is more than just a news aggregation app, it's a huge interest mining and data recommendation system. Moreover, the company expands its services to mobile video sharing platform and many other fields so as to collect more dimensional data of users. --- In my opinion, ByteDance is a data/intelligence company and Toutiao is just a great app to adopt the technology and grow fast. So, we look forward to seeing an…

BTW, the company has acquired many popular user-data-content apps and companies worldwide, while few of them were exposed.

Re: Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market

#40

Post by adventured »

abrichr wrote: post #32

Is there an English language equivalent of Toutiao? If not, why?

Sure, the landscape for aggregators is more fractured though, due to the long duration of establishment of huge news sources in the English markets (ie the English market is very consolidated at the top).

Eg: Hacker News, Google News, Business Insider, Buzzfeed, Reddit, Huffington Post, Drudgereport, Digg, Flipboard, Techmeme, Redef and about 57 others. Some of them mix original content with blatantly regurgitated content, some are pure play aggregation. They're all playing in or right around the Toutiao neighborhood.

The established players, and how well known they are, makes it far more difficult to build super valuable aggregators. If you want business news, you likely already know about Bloomberg, CNBC, etc. and they're going to cover most stories that matter.

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