Analysis of Qutoutiao’s user incentive system!

The user incentive system is a key part of the user operation system. Through the user incentive system, users can be triggered to perform key behaviors, improve user value, and achieve product fission growth. This article analyzes the product logic and user usage paths of Qutoutiao in the sinking market and discovers the key user behaviors. Then, by disassembling Toutiao's user incentive system, we find out the behaviors that correspond to the product's actual incentive system and give corresponding optimization suggestions.

1. Product Introduction

1.1 Product Status

(1) Product Overview

Qutoutiao is committed to creating a new form of information reading APP, using platform, media and win-win approach, using mobile applications as a carrier for content creation and information reading, and providing more useful, interesting and beneficial content to everyone.

Qutoutiao is a dark horse emerging from the "emerging market". According to the latest data, Qutoutiao's net revenue in the first quarter of this year was 1.1188 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 373.3%; advertising and marketing revenue was 1.0872 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 371.3%.

(2) Basic data

• 71 million independent devices per month, the product is in the mature stage
• The male to female ratio is 6:4
• The age distribution is mainly between 25 and 35 years old, accounting for nearly 60%
• Users are mainly distributed in urban areas of third-tier and fourth-tier cities and below

(Data source: iResearch)

1.2 Product Value

(1) Product positioning

Through personalized recommendations, we provide users with interesting and valuable personalized content and services.

(2) Profit model

As an information APP, Qutoutiao's profit points mainly lie in:

• Help increase user growth through fission of gold coin incentives.
• By combining information flow advertising with advertising promotion in the task system, the advertising revenue of the entire site can be increased.

1.3 User Requirements

Analyze user needs based on the KANO model:

• Basic needs: check current news, share/download/collect/like, short videos, small videos, account management.
• Expected needs: segmented industry information and interaction with other users.
• Charm-type needs: personalized intelligent recommendations, making money through reading apps.

1.4 User Profile

As an information-based "Pinduoduo" for the sinking market, Qutoutiao has expanded its user base to people in third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities, targeting people aged between 24 and 35. On the one hand, this group of people likes to learn more about information and videos through Qutoutiao, and on the other hand, they like to earn coins and then withdraw cash through Qutoutiao's various task gameplay, thereby achieving the goal of active and sharing fission of the Qutoutiao operation team.

2. Analysis of User Incentive Behavior

The user incentive system mainly promotes user growth and improves user value by motivating users' key behaviors .

Qutoutiao users are mainly divided into content producers and content consumers. Through the push of information, users click on and consume content. At the same time, through incentives such as task systems, membership level systems, gold coins, etc., users are stimulated to continuously consume and share content, ensuring user activity while promoting product exposure.

By sorting out the product business logic, summarizing the user's product usage path, and inferring the product's key user behavior items.

2.1 Product Operation System

The product operation system of an information APP can be broken down into three basic elements: growth strategy, user operation system, and key user behaviors.

The relationship between the three is as follows:

• Growth strategies solve customer acquisition problems for products and bring new users to products. Growth strategies are divided into product self-growth and external growth strategies.
• User operation system, including user tiered operation, user life cycle management, and user incentive system. The common goal of the three is to guide users to perform certain key behaviors through corresponding strategies, improve user loyalty, user value, etc., so that users can enter the growth stage from the novice stage and then enter the mature stage from the growth stage more quickly.
• Key user behaviors. The occurrence of key user behaviors usually means that users have a deeper connection with the product and users experience the core value of the product.

The user incentive system is a key part of the user operation system. Through the user incentive system, users can be triggered to perform key behaviors and improve user value. At the same time, by stimulating users to share and invite new users, the product can achieve exponential growth.

2.2 Business Logic

The product business logic of Qutoutiao is roughly as follows:

2.3 User Usage Path

Core Path:

• Content Consumer: Reading
• Content producers: publish articles, videos, short videos

Non-core paths:

• Content consumers: like, comment, favorite, share
• Content Producers: Reply to Comments

Extension Path:

• Content consumers: following others, interactive chat, tasks

2.4 Key User Behaviors

Core path key behaviors:

• Content consumers: Complete reading behavior
• Content producers: complete the publishing of articles, videos, and short videos

Non-core paths:

• Content consumers: complete likes, comments, favorites, and shares
• Content producer: Complete the reply comment action

Extension Path:

• Content consumers: follow others, interact and chat, and complete tasks

2.5 Analysis of Motivational Behavior

Incentive behavior serves the overall user value growth of the product. User growth can be analyzed from the perspective of increasing the value of individual users and increasing the user scale .

• The growth of Qutoutiao's user value is achieved by stimulating content producers to produce more high-quality content, while stimulating content consumers to consume more content and like and comment on the content.
• The user base grows on the one hand through external advertising, and on the other hand through internal self-growth, i.e. guiding users to share content, etc. to achieve user base growth.

Specifically speaking of key user behaviors,

• For content consumers, the main incentives are to read articles, watch videos, and share content. At the same time, high-quality comments can be rewarded with gold coins from others, stimulating users to interact with the content.
• For content producers, it encourages users to publish more high-quality content (articles, videos, short videos, etc.).

Next, by disassembling Qutoutiao’s main user incentive system, we can find out whether the product incentivizes these key behaviors.

3. User Incentive System and Incentive Means

3.1 Content Producers

For content producers, Qutoutiao’s incentive system includes:

• Signing Plan ("Rest assured plan", "fast track plan", "partner plan")
• Identity honor incentives (producer identity authentication, original logo, etc.)
• Cash income incentives (appreciation, originality double, advertising income)

It can be found that the above three strategies are all aimed at motivating content producers to directly drive users to produce content emotionally and profit- oriented.

3.2 Content Consumers

For content consumers , Qutoutiao’s incentive system mainly includes:

• Gold Coin System (Points System)
• Mission System
• Membership System
• Medal system

3.2.1 Gold Coin System

The gold coin system is essentially a product points system. At the same time, the gold coins of Qutoutiao can be exchanged for cash. The current exchange rate is 10,000:1

There are two ways for users to obtain gold coins:

• Users can earn coins by completing tasks .
• Users earn coins by spending time online and reading content .
• Users can earn gold coins from others by leaving high-quality comments .
• Users can earn coins by playing games and downloading apps .

The ways for users to consume coins are:

• Coin withdrawal
• Exchange goods

Gold coins are the basis for Qutoutiao to achieve explosive growth. Qutoutiao is a "Pinduoduo" of consulting services with its channels sinking. The direct profit drive can greatly mobilize users' desires. By using Qutoutiao, users can obtain gold coins and earn cash by completing tasks, reading, sharing, inviting new members, etc., thereby achieving explosive growth of the product.

3.2.2 Task System

The task system includes newcomer tasks, daily tasks, sign-in, reading tasks, and level tasks. The specific breakdown is as follows:

(1) Newcomer tasks

The main users guide new users to read, cash out, share, and invite, and reward users with relatively large amounts of gold coins, stimulating new users to experience the core value of the product faster.

(2) Daily tasks

Daily tasks serve user growth and advertising monetization . These include user growth tasks such as scanning codes to receive red envelopes, inviting friends to join Qutoutiao, opening treasure chests to share, waking up friends, following public accounts, and other user growth tasks, as well as advertising monetization tasks such as earning gold coins by trying out games, and downloading apps to receive free products.

Take inviting new members as an example. By inviting friends, you can get cash rewards:

As the number of invited friends increases, the cash earned can increase from 9 yuan/person to a maximum of 13 yuan/person. The operation team has set up a three-day distribution of rewards. On the one hand, it avoids the behavior of wool-pulling parties; on the other hand, it is conducive to new users to experience the core value of the product through long-term use, thereby improving the retention rate of new users.

Taking the sharing of treasure chest as an example, the process is as follows:

A free treasure chest is available every four hours. Through continuous interest incentives, users are encouraged to share and earn gold coins to achieve the operational goal of product fission and dissemination.

(3) Sign in

Obtaining gold coins through daily sign-ins encourages users to sign in every day using the product, and as the number of consecutive sign-in days increases, more gold coins are obtained. Improve user retention rate on the next day or even seven days.

In addition, the task system also includes gamification of growing vegetables to earn gold coins, which increases product playability through gamification experience and improves user stay time and retention rate.

(4) Other tasks

Users can:

• Reading time
• Online time period
• Level-specific reading time and continuous login (for example, LV5 and LV9 users enjoy additional experience and overtime benefits)

You can get extra gold and experience.

The task system mainly rewards users with gold coins and cash rewards to stimulate users to complete certain tasks with corresponding behaviors. Therefore, the task system and the gold coin system are interrelated.

3.2.3 Medal system

The medal system of Qutoutiao includes ordinary medals, super medals, and historical medals. The historical medals are given for logging in on specific holidays. The medals can be worn to show your uniqueness and satisfy your vanity.

Badges are mainly designed around sharing, reading time, number of logins, and reading content. The following table lists specific badges and corresponding conditions and corresponding incentive behaviors:

Badges are designed to motivate users to share products, increase product usage time and frequency, and read more types of content through their desire for relatively scarce and displayable badges, thereby achieving the goals of user self-growth, user retention, and user activity.

3.2.4 Disassembly of the Member Incentive System

As shown above, there are screenshots of Qutoutiao’s membership system and a breakdown of the membership system.

Qutoutiao membership is divided into 10 levels, from LV1 to LV10. Each level enjoys a different number of benefits, among which LV10 can enjoy 12 benefits.

• From an operational perspective, by setting up different levels of rights and interests, we can guide user behavior, continuously extend the user's product stay time, increase the number of logins, and improve user activity and retention rates.
• From the user's perspective, users gain experience points by completing corresponding behaviors, thereby upgrading their levels and enjoying more rights and interests.

By analyzing the rights and descriptions of users at different levels, we can find that the subtleties of the rights and interests are:

• Combined with the gold coin system, users are guided to continue to use the product in depth. The LV1 overtime reward only requires users to continuously switch content to obtain rewards, while the LV5 additional experience rights stimulate users to log in continuously and use for more than 30 minutes to obtain additional rewards.
• The higher the level, the more personalized skins, avatar decorations, colorful nicknames, etc. can be obtained, giving users a sense of vanity and improving their satisfaction with the product.

In general, the rights and interests corresponding to each level and the behavior analysis of incentive users are as follows:

Next, we analyze user behaviors motivated by the membership system from both horizontal and vertical perspectives.

From a horizontal perspective, users need to complete the following actions to gain experience points:

• Read content
• Daily Sign-in
• Share content
• Invite newcomers
• Wake up your friends

Horizontal experience points are acquired through user content consumption, user sign-ins, user sharing, and user invitations to friends. These methods reflect the purpose of operations to guide user activity, retention, and achieve product self-growth.

From a vertical perspective, the higher the user level, the longer they will use the product, and the more sticky they will be to the platform. The platform also encourages users to use the product through higher and more rights, forming a positive cycle mechanism, as follows:

• The overtime reward of LV1 stimulates users to constantly switch reading content to obtain rewards.
• The extra experience of LV5 encourages users to log in for 7 consecutive days and use it for more than 30 minutes to obtain extra rewards.
• LV9’s overtime benefits stimulate users to extend their stay in the product and obtain rewards.

By setting user level rights, we guide users to complete corresponding active, retention, and sharing actions. On the one hand, we improve the user's activity and promote their status advancement. On the other hand, we stimulate the internal growth of the product and continuously add new users to the product.

IV. Conclusion

Judging from the rights and interests conditions of the corresponding levels of Qutoutiao, it is mainly about directly granting rights and interests of identity honors and gold coin experience, stimulating users to complete longer and more frequent visits to the product. However, there is a lack of corresponding level incentives for users to share products, interact, comment, and other operations to deepen their communication with the product.

From the perspective of the overall incentive system, combined with the Fogg model, Qutoutiao summarizes the corresponding behavioral incentives as follows:

It can be found that: for content consumers, Qutoutiao as a whole is more about encouraging users to log in, be active, share and invite new users, while other activities such as commenting, following, collecting and other activities are not given much attention. Therefore, corresponding daily tasks and level benefits incentive gameplay can be designed for these behaviors.

On the one hand, it can push content that users like more accurately, and on the other hand, it can increase the interaction between users and products, accumulate more emotional costs, and better guide users to complete more high-quality identity advancement.

Author: Xie Zexian

Source: Xie Zexian