The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King
blog.ycombinator.com
The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King
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Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King
#2Hey! Anu here, a Partner at YC's Continuity Fund. Happy to chat about anything discussed in this post and would love any feedback.
Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King
#3Hey! Anu here, a Partner at YC's Continuity Fund. Happy to chat about anything discussed in this post and would love any feedback.
Has Toutiao been through YC core program?
Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King
#4How many "social features" does Toutiaco have in comparison to Facebook or Twitter? I thought that was the essential feature to get user engagement, but Toutiao blows both Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat out of the water.
Toutiao stays true to Asian usability dogmas and opens all links in new tabs (target="_blank")[1].
Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King
#5Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King
#6Hey! Anu here, a Partner at YC's Continuity Fund. Happy to chat about anything discussed in this post and would love any feedback.
Given that most people in SV don't have connections to China, how did your personal investment in Toutiao come about?
And given the amount of money in China, why did Toutiao need or want non-Chinese investors, particularly individual investors?
Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King
#7How many "social features" does Toutiaco have in comparison to Facebook or Twitter? I thought that was the essential feature to get user engagement, but Toutiao blows both Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat out of the water. Toutiao stays true to Asian usability dogmas and opens all links in new tabs (target="_blank")[1]. [1]: http://www.toutiao.com/
Good question. They did not have many social features at the start - especially in year 1 (no followers, no friends, no chat). Over time they added like, dislike, retweet, comments functionality.What made them really stand out in the first year was the catchy title, delicate product design and pretty much the first personalized news aggregator with recommendations in 2012. They also iterated heavily to remain as one of the top apps in the app store during the first year. In the first month - users gravitated towards the app as it became the destination to read all top trending news /stories that were going viral that day (it solved a gap in the market, no one else was doing it). Over time they recommended stories to users and tracked data to ensure only relevant stories were being pushed which helped increase engagement.
Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King
#8Hey! Anu here, a Partner at YC's Continuity Fund. Happy to chat about anything discussed in this post and would love any feedback.
As someone not familiar with Toutiao, could you describe how the Q&A function works from a user perspective?
I'm guessing there's a part of the app where the user goes for Q&As. If a user asks "How do I flush my car's cooling system?", does the question get sent to all users who like cars?
Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King
#9>> The average user spends more than 74 minutes each day in Toutiao
so many wasted lives
Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King
#10As an avid user of Toutiao, I am super impressed by Toutiao. It is super easy to use and shows the content I am mostly interested in. I use it daily to get information. I am a little bit worried that I would not get broad views if Toutiao only shows articles I am interested in.