How did Qutoutiao achieve more than 10 million daily active users?

Qutoutiao has emerged as a dark horse among information apps and can definitely be considered a dark horse .

With a growth rate of 500%, Qutoutiao successfully entered the APP Store's news category ranking and ranked fifth. In February of this year, Qutoutiao's monthly active users were more than 30 million. In March of this year, it received another US$200 million in financing from Tencent. It can also be said that Qutoutiao is Tencent’s weapon to declare war on Toutiao .

In fact, at first glance, most users would think that this is an application that is almost similar to Toutiao. Moreover, there is nothing special about the news content of Qutoutiao. The homepage is full of misleading headlines and not-so-high-quality content. So how can Qutoutiao successfully stand out among so many old-fashioned information apps?

Ultimately, Qutoutiao's counterattack is based on a complete cash reward mechanism for recruiting disciples.

This article will focus on analyzing how Qutoutiao uses cash rewards to achieve its user growth goals.

Pinduoduo-style user sinking

Qutoutiao's user group positioning is more like Pinduoduo's user group positioning, sinking the user base to the people in third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities, focusing on people between 24 and 35 years old. This group of people will have more time to share and figure out ways to make money, and share their own QR codes for recruiting disciples through WeChat groups and Moments . If the users were targeted at first- and second-tier populations, the operating model of recruiting disciples to make money would not have been so popular.

Cash reward mechanism for small town users

Qutoutiao’s cash rewards are an incentive system that converts user behavior into cash. Users who read, comment on information or recruit disciples can receive a certain number of gold coins, which can be converted into cash withdrawals.

1. Daily Sign-in
2. Complete daily tasks (read, comment, share, etc.)
3. Rebate for apprenticeship

You can sign in and complete tasks every day, but the gold coins you earn are not much, so it is still difficult to earn enough money to withdraw.

If you want to get a lot of gold coins, you have to accept disciples. As the name suggests, recruiting disciples means inviting people to register. The more people you invite, the more benefits you will get.

The above mentioned Qutoutiao’s mechanism of recruiting disciples. In fact, recruiting disciples is the invitation mechanism that has been overused in Internet operations . So why did Qutoutiao rely on recruiting disciples to achieve a counterattack in user growth?

1. Guiding the psychology of making money: creating a scenario where making money is easy

After entering the APP, users will receive a cash red envelope, and after registering the APP, they will receive a notification of the red envelope receipt. Generally, users will click on the free red envelopes they see, and after clicking, they will enter the "My Gold Coins" page. Users can get a certain amount of gold coins without having to do anything.

2. Incentives for Silent Users: Individual Ways to Make Money Without Socialization

Some users just want to read the news and are not willing to share it on their friends circle to recruit disciples. Naturally, these users need to be motivated. Through daily check-ins, reading, comments, and set novice tasks and daily tasks, users can also earn a certain amount of cash. This also avoids the situation where users who are unwilling to share have no motivation to use Qutoutiao.

3. Activate users: cash back in phases

The rewards for recruiting disciples at Qutoutiao are not credited to the account immediately. If they were, it would definitely attract many professional teams to come in and recruit disciples. The reward for accepting an apprentice will be distributed in 5 installments, once a day.

And when the apprentice no longer logs in to the APP, you can also get rewards by waking up the apprentice.

For enterprises, the cost of activating old users is much lower than the cost of attracting new users. This approach can significantly reduce the cost of activating old users by helping to activate old users through spontaneous user behavior, and enterprises only need to give users some gold coin rewards.

The gameplay is actually very simple, which is to invite users to register and get cash. However, Qutoutiao has added another layer of master-apprentice gameplay on top of this. Make users addicted through gamification . To sum up, there are actually 3 steps.

• Creating user motivation – cash rewards
• Gamification gameplay - recruiting apprentices and completing tasks
• Generous feedback - random or variable gold coin reward system

Qutoutiao's cash reward mechanism for recruiting disciples has broken through by using the strategy of surrounding the city from the countryside. Although Qutoutiao itself is not outstanding in terms of content, as the number of users increases, the optimization of the recommendation engine algorithm will become more and more professional.

As long as you have user traffic , you are one step closer to success. From the success of Qutoutiao, we can also recognize the different strategies for user growth. Targeted growth models can be adopted for different user positioning. Qutoutiao’s cash inducement and apprentice-recruiting approach for users in third- and fourth-tier wireless towns is worth considering.

The author of this article @胡坎胡坎 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games