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The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#31

Post by samstave »

flachsechs wrote: post #27
alangou wrote: post #22

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…

google absolutely sucks at it, probably because they don't see any value in it given their user base (everyone) and lack of competition. 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.

YouTube makes me want to punch my computer.

The related videos are never relevant, letting a child meander through YouTube invariably winds up showing my kids super inappropriate content. The YouTube mobile app sucks horribly (ios) I literally think that YouTube is one of the worst ubiquitous services there is.

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#32

Post by indescions_2017 »

Toutiao is one of the names often bandied as a potential candidate for having a US-based IPO, alongside Best, Roku, CarGurus, and some 100+ other Chinese consumer internet unicorns ;)

Your insightful analysis of Toutiao's AI depth is enough to tempt one to dip a toe should shares trade publicly. But the revenue growth (contextual ad based) is phenomenal as well. Any clues as to how they might seek to expand into paid content or media? Or otherwise grow beyond Chinese language centric markets?

Chinese startup Toutiao raising funds at over $20 billion valuation

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-toutiao-fundraising...

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#33

Post by zmitri »

anuh wrote: post #29
zmitri wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am afraid I cannot do justice to this question by answering it in a few sentences in this forum. Toutiao is one of the first apps in China to enable creators to write content and find audience without having to go through other media outlets. So in a way they are transforming the way information is made available to people. If you would like to discuss more email me directly at anu@ycombinator.com

I agree it's tough to do justice in a few sentences in a forum, which is why I assumed it would be done in the very in depth and otherwise interesting article you wrote :)

In my opinion it's the absence of this topic from the article that makes YC look tone deaf once again by glossing over a serious repercussion that technology can have on society for the sake of self-promotion -- especially given current events regarding the manipulation of social networks by foreign entities and a very serious history of censorship and media control.

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#34

Post by anuh »

indescions_2017 wrote: post #32

Toutiao is one of the names often bandied as a potential candidate for having a US-based IPO, alongside Best, Roku, CarGurus, and some 100+ other Chinese consumer internet unicorns ;) Your insightful analysis of Toutiao's AI depth is enough to tempt one to dip a toe should shares trade publicly. But the revenue growth (contextual ad based) is phenomenal as well. Any clues as to how they might seek to expand into paid…

Toutiao is now focused on video as it is increasingly becoming more important (more supply of video content and more consumption as well). Outside of Chinese language centric markets they have an investment in India (which they have announced publicly). India is definitely a market that could potentially benefit from algorithm based content discovery (several different states/languages and a long tail of content that is not easily available to users).

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#35

Post by ComodoHacker »

huangc10 wrote: post #28

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…

Couldn't government-controlled company publish their real stats?

I personally think any sufficiently large company in China is partially government-controlled. But does it change any of the business analysis presented here?

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#36

Post by dashtoanother »

anuh wrote: post #30
huangc10 wrote: post #28

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…

I can’t convince you to be a believer :) That is totally up to you!

Can you go home at the end of the day, look into your kid's eyes, and say 'mommy made a difference today, helping a dictatorship government control its own people, and spread its controlling message, eventually to the world'?

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#37

Post by zodiac »

huangc10 wrote: post #28

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…

> They can easily funnel all internet traffic to Toutiao

They can't force users to download the app and use it (without us knowing it), can they? They could control the content it shows users, but how does that make the stats inaccurate?

Re: The Forces Behind Toutiao, China’s Content King

#38

Post by moron4hire »

samstave wrote: post #31
flachsechs wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

google absolutely sucks at it, probably because they don't see any value in it given their user base (everyone) and lack of competition. 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.

YouTube makes me want to punch my computer. The related videos are never relevant, letting a child meander through YouTube invariably winds up showing my kids super inappropriate content. The YouTube mobile app sucks horribly (ios) I literally think that YouTube is one of the worst ubiquitous services there is.

This isn't a great solution, because kids are pretty good at getting out and into whatever app they want, but there is a YouTube Kids app. It's more like streaming TV than YouTube.
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