With over 10 million daily active users, how does Qutoutiao operate?

As Pinduoduo went public and its stock price soared, many people on social networks expressed disdain for the low-priced goods on Pinduoduo. It is true that most of the products on Pinduoduo are suspected of being counterfeit and shoddy, and there is no doubt that they are skirting the law.

I have always felt that shopping on Pinduoduo is essentially the same as downloading pirated movies from subtitle group websites. In the final analysis, it is all about getting a bargain.

Is a movie and TV membership of 20 yuan a month expensive? This is probably just the lunch money for a friend working in a first-tier city, but why are most people still unwilling to pay for membership?

You have the right to buy a bottle of Dettol disinfectant for 60 yuan, but that cannot deprive others of the right to buy a bottle of Moon Above laundry detergent for 9.9 yuan!

This is getting off topic. As a representative of the sinking of users, Pinduoduo has stirred the nerves of many people after its successful listing. How did Qutoutiao , known as the Pinduoduo of the information industry, achieve rapid growth?

Probably because friends who work in the Internet industry like to use iPhones, many articles analyzing Toutiao products on the Internet only focus on iOS. However, for a product that focuses on attracting lower-tier users, Android is the perfect platform for it to flourish. Therefore, the analysis and screenshots in this article are all from the Android version of Qutoutiao.

1. 40 million monthly active users, ranking among the top 10 information platforms

Let’s take a look at the data of Qutoutiao in the past year:

It can be seen that in the middle of 2017, Qutoutiao still had around 15 million monthly active users. By June of this year, Qutoutiao's monthly active users had reached 40 million, and its daily active users were close to 12 million . In just one year, Qutoutiao’s monthly active users more than doubled, and its daily active users increased to three times the original level.

According to iResearch data, Qutoutiao is currently ranked 9th among information apps.

2. Redefining production relations

On traditional news apps or information aggregation platforms, “users” have always been defined as exploited roles, with “content” as feed to keep them in captivity, and then sold to “advertisers” in batches after they are fattened up.

Qutoutiao felt that this was too unfair to its user base, and slammed the table: We want to give rebates to our users! !

In this way, the Qutoutiao App has both consumption and production attributes, and users can earn cash income while consuming content on it .

3. The content is deep enough

Many friends feel that the content quality of Toutiao is too poor and completely unbearable to watch. If these friends had read the content of Qutoutiao, they would probably pinch their eyes.

Taking the "Technology" category as an example, IT Home , Zhongguancun Online, iFanr, 36Kr , and Huxiu must be absent, and the content is generally based on the style of CCTV-10 Science and Education Channel.

The higher the quality of the content and the more original content, the more vertical the audience. Among information apps, there are only two major categories of vertical classification apps, namely automobiles and sports, whose monthly active users can reach tens of millions. In the categories of finance, technology, and military, the best ones are only worth millions.

"User sinking" means that users must stay away from first- and second-tier cities. Users in third-tier cities are considered high-end users. For these users, reading the news is just a way to kill time. Playing with mobile phones also requires using the brain, which is too tiring! Big and comprehensive, mediocre and vulgar, these are the core competitiveness! The most basic thing is to use a good title , and the accompanying pictures must be eye-catching!

4. High-density advertising

As the saying goes, "the wool comes from the sheep", giving rebates to users means a reduction in net profit. How can we balance the pros and cons? Qutoutiao chose a direct and crude method: fill it with advertisements!

A simple statistics was conducted on four places: article information flow , video information flow, article page and video page.

• In the information flow of the article, 10 pieces of information are loaded each time, including 2 advertisements, and the homogeneity of the advertisements is very serious, almost like a brainwashing bombardment. In addition, when you open the App for the first time, there will be a special advertisement at the top of the information flow, which is usually a download guide for the promotional App.
• In the video information stream, each load is 9 videos, including 1 advertisement.
• On the information article page, there is a banner ad below the like button at the end of the article, and there are 9 related information items below, 3 of which are advertisements.
• On the video page, there are 8 related videos below the player, including 2 advertisements, and the first advertisement is split into 3 small advertisements.

In general, the advertising exposure rate of Qutoutiao is about 1.5 to 2 times that of its similar product Toutiao.

How can we make users tolerate such a high density of ads?

Qutoutiao chose the most direct way, which is to give money directly to users !

5. Perfect Monetary System

Qutoutiao user accounts have two currencies: change and gold coins .

"Change" is actually cash, and users can withdraw it directly to Alipay or WeChat . "Gold coins" are a kind of virtual currency. Users can get gold coins by completing different tasks. The gold coins are settled once every morning and converted into change based on the exchange rate of the day. The ratio is about 1600:1.

Setting the currency exchange rate to "one thousand to one" is also very clever. It not only ensures that the gold coin rewards obtained by users each time are positive integers, but also effectively controls costs.

Which of the following two reward methods do you think is friendlier?

• Congratulations on completing the reading and receiving a reward of 0.001 yuan!
• Congratulations on completing the reading and receiving a 10 gold coin reward!

Change and gold coins are only the basis of the currency system. Qutoutiao has perfected the withdrawal process based on this basis, which is mainly reflected in:

• No need to bind a bank card, you can withdraw cash directly to Alipay or WeChat
• The threshold for cash withdrawal is extremely low, you can withdraw cash with 1 yuan
• Withdrawal speed is super fast, and the funds arrive in seconds

I tried it twice and the speed is really amazing. Once the withdrawal is confirmed in the Qutoutiao App, you will receive a notification on WeChat within a few seconds that the withdrawal amount has been received.

So, is it enough to maximize the experience?

Obviously not. No matter how good the experience is, it will be useless if users have not used it. To this end, Qutoutiao has also made some clever designs:

• As long as the new user successfully registers, there will be a 1 yuan red envelope in the account
• In the Personal Center, there is always a bubble prompt of "One Yuan Withdrawal" on the "Withdrawal Exchange" icon
• In the task list, there is also a "cash withdrawal task" to remind users to withdraw cash. If the withdrawal is successful, they can also get gold coin rewards.

With this combination of measures, new users completed their first cash withdrawal in a short period of time. In addition to cultivating user habits, it also allows users to have a new understanding of the product, and users also develop trust in the "Qutoutiao" brand , all of which lay a solid foundation for subsequent user retention rates .

6. Gamified Task Design

By killing this monster, the character will gain money and experience, and there is a chance that top-quality equipment will drop.

Move this red block to eliminate the entire row of red blocks.

After completing this set of operations, the character can release a special move.

Purposefulness and positive feedback are the key to making games addictive.

To put it simply, the tasks of Qutoutiao are classified into: gold coin tasks and change tasks .

There aren’t many tasks that can directly earn you pocket money. Apart from a few tasks for newbies, “ attracting new members ” has become the most direct way to make money.

For every successful friend you invite, you will receive a cash reward of approximately 10 yuan.

However, the 10 yuan will not be credited immediately. The invited friends need to complete the specified tasks before the inviter can receive the full reward. The main purpose of doing this is to prevent spamming, and it can also make the product's daily activity and retention rate look better.

As for gold coin tasks, in addition to the sign-in rewards, novice tasks and daily tasks in the task list, there are also time rewards, reading rewards, value-added service rewards and so on.

Sign-in reward: After 7 days a week, you can get 676 gold coins, which is approximately equal to 0.4 yuan.

Newbie Task: You can get 30 gold coins by completing the cash withdrawal task.

Daily tasks:

• You can get 100 gold coins by following the WeChat official account . You need to bind WeChat first and can only receive it once.
• You can earn 150 gold coins, which is approximately 0.1 yuan, by reading news for 60 minutes every day.
• High-quality comments can earn 200 gold coins, but they need to be reviewed and adopted as high-quality comments.
• You can get 50 gold coins by showing off your income, but what you share is a QR code image for downloading the App, so this reward is almost impossible to get.
• You can get 480 gold coins by opening and sharing a treasure chest. You can play every day and open it once every 4 hours, but the prize for opening a treasure chest is random, usually only single-digit gold coins.

Reading bonus:

• You can get a certain amount of gold coins as rewards every 30 seconds of reading information and watching videos.
• When reading information, users need to continuously scroll through the articles to simulate reading, otherwise the timer will stop.
• Reading the same article for a long time will yield diminishing returns.
• You don't need to scroll back and forth to watch the video. The timer will not stop as long as the video is playing.

The test was conducted dozens of times with the following amounts: 8 gold coins, 10 gold coins, 15 gold coins, and 20 gold coins.

A simple calculation shows that the income is about 25 gold coins per minute, which is 1,500 gold coins per hour. Add to that the 150 gold coins rewarded for the 60-minute reading task. Users can earn 1 yuan by using Qutoutiao to read information for 1 hour every day .

Although the actual benefits are not much, during the reading process, users will be reminded of the gold coin benefits every 30 seconds. This real-time feedback will constantly stimulate users and even subtly adjust their definition of reading. In the end, users may forget that they are reading the news just to pass the time.

From the tasks listed above, it can be seen that the only way to ensure stable and continuous income is to read information and watch videos.

This also reflects the core idea of ​​the Qutoutiao team: reading is the foundation of the entire product. Social fission may cause the number of users to surge in the short term, but after the madness, there will only be a mess.

As more and more apps have changed their default login method to WeChat, Qutoutiao still uses mobile phone numbers as the default login method for new users, which indirectly shows that Qutoutiao's business model does not rely on social networks.

Final Thoughts

The war in mobile Internet is coming to an end. There is little untapped market left, and China's smartphone market has long passed its growth spurt.

Faced with homogeneous products and services, how can we squeeze out competitors and win users in the existing market?

Perhaps, innovative business models are the future competitiveness.

Source: JanTooMen