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Checked out Toutiao's website, I think registering if you don't speak Chinese is nearly impossible - google translate doesn't seem to work on the login page. You can copy/paste each string into google translate individually, if you're patient enough ;)
It's a problem orthogonal to what Google solved earlier in the millenium, which is roughly "How do I find an answer on the Internet to a question I already have in mind?"
As the Internet has developed, the cost of content creation and data have decreased dramatically. And so the sheer quantity of content has exploded. Every consumer tech company has partially recognized this problem - Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Instagram, Snapchat, and Medium all want to recommend you relevant content, all have adopted feeds of articles and posts and pictures, and all desperately want your continued attention.
At this point, there's likely good content on the Internet for every single person's taste (like Anu said, there's a very long tail of content creators). The service that provides the most relevant selection of it will win consumer interest and usage at the largest scale.
And it certainly seems that Toutiao has leapfrogged everyone else in this regard. I'm very excited (but also a little wary) to see what they come up with in the future.
As 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.
I have an account on Youtube that I used for only a specific interest.
Youtube's suggestions are pretty bad. And they've declined in quality. And Youtube makes a strong effort to selling me mainstream content that I uniformly reject. And I can find better recommendations on suggested videos fitting my interest than I find on the Youtube landing for my account. And I'd be for Youtube to keep a list of search terms and such for further viewing.
My deduction from this is that Youtube is more interested in pushing content of other people's choice than giving me what I want. And that's pretty standard for how all media has worked since the early days of radio.
So it seems like it would be easy for a content company to get engagement by giving people what they want to view. And the challenge problem is often what people want to view doesn't garner much payment per views. And so having a bunch of engagement by itself doesn't give you success, rather what makes money is careful balance of desired content and pushed-content (IE crap).
TL;DR; Does engagement equal success? I have an account on Youtube that I used for only a specific interest. Youtube's suggestions are pretty bad. And they've declined in quality. And Youtube makes a strong effort to selling me mainstream content that I uniformly reject. And I can find better recommendations on suggested videos fitting my interest than I find on the Youtube landing for my account. And I'd be for Yout…
Off topic: http://www.toutiao.com/a6474835351272686094/#p=7 The (Beijing?) smog pictured here is somehow more poignant since the article has 0 to do with pollution... just people living their lives. Scary.
That is Mountain Taijun, 7000+ feet peak with national AAAAA-rated tourist attractions (and not in Beijing). So no, I don't think that's smog, probably just fog.
Toutiao is solving the Internet's current most pressing consumer-facing problem - the discovery of relevant content. It's a problem orthogonal to what Google solved earlier in the millenium, which is roughly "How do I find an answer on the Internet to a question I already have in mind?" As the Internet has developed, the cost of content creation and data have decreased dramatically. And so the sheer quantity of conte…
i.e. my youtube front page just shows the same 100 video links over and over and over.
there isn't even a really good way to discover relevant content in the channels i've already subscribed to. it's pretty lame.
Toutiao is a privately owned company held in Beijing. Am I being paranoid? They can claim machine learning (and they probably do). However, until we can be 100% certain the Chinese government is not involved, I wouldn't personally trust any of the stats.
Hey! Anu here, a Partner at YC's Continuity Fund. Happy to chat about anything discussed in this post and would love any feedback.
I'm a little disappointed in this post given China's penchant to controlling news/media/content. I see how this could easily be manipulated into an extremely powerful propaganda tool - especially hiding behind a guise of "algorithms" are doing all the work - and yet it is not mentioned at all in the post. We have already seen how content systems like Facebook, Google, and Twitter can be manipulated via botnets, but w…
How can we trust any of the analytics coming out of mainland China? Can you be 100% positive that Toutiao is not controlled by the Chinese government? They can easily funnel all internet traffic to Toutiao and control it, and use it to their advantage. Curate the news to whatever way they want. Toutiao is a privately owned company held in Beijing. Am I being paranoid? They can claim machine learning (and they probabl…