Traffic of Baidu mobile news feed increased 20 times in three months. Has content ecology become the new driver of Baidu?

Baidu released its Q3 2016 financial report today. In this quarter, the total revenue for Q3 2016 was RMB 18.253 billion (approximately US$2.737 billion). Among them, the content ecology has achieved phased results. The traffic of Baidu mobile information flow has increased 20 times in the past three months.

When I saw the word "information flow", the first thing that came to my mind were platforms with social network attributes such as Twitter and Facebook. Baidu Mobile Information Flow is an intelligent information product that recommends "differentiated content" to users based on the user's search big data feature algorithm. In essence, it has many similarities with Facebook.

I have written many articles analyzing China's content industry before, and the focus of the content industry is the mobile information war. The top ten giants including BAT, Toutiao , Yidian Zixun, and Weibo are competing for this emerging market that has some connection with portals but is completely different and many times larger.

Regarding the progress of Baidu's content ecology, the capital market asked many questions in today's earnings call. Fundamentally, the question is: How much commercial monetization space will the information flow bring? To answer this question, we must first clarify some more fundamental issues.

How valuable is information flow to Baidu?

For Baidu Mobile, increasing the information flow is conducive to enhancing user stickiness, seizing user time, and transforming mobile search from a short-term to a long-term application, thereby bringing more possibilities for monetization.

For Baidu, this move by Baidu Mobile means that it will keep more traffic within the Baidu system in the future. Baidu Mobile may become an outlet for its own content. In addition to Baidu News and Baijiahao content, there may also be Baidu Knows, Baidu Encyclopedia, Baidu Tieba and other content output through the Baidu Mobile information flow, intelligently connecting people and services.

Given that a lot of content can be directly imported into the service, Baidu Mobile's move to increase information flow will also be conducive to the implementation of Baidu's service strategy.

But it is worth noting that there is a key capability behind the Baidu mobile information flow: personalized recommendations. Personalized information is the current mainstream direction, meeting users' needs for fragmented reading in the era of information explosion, and personalized technology is also the core competitiveness of Baidu mobile information flow.

In order to make the content better match user needs, Baidu's artificial intelligence technology also plays an important role behind the scenes. Baidu Mobile uses its user profiling capabilities to discover and capture user needs.

As of now, the number of tags for Baidu user portraits has reached 2 million and is in a rapid growth stage. Through user portraits, Baidu can understand what content users need that is still scarce, and thereby encourage the production of corresponding content. At the same time, user profiling capabilities can effectively support accurate content distribution. Through big data, content ecosystem platforms can better understand users and recommend personalized content.

With the help of Baidu's artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), deep learning (DeepLearning) and other technologies and over one million user tags, Baidu Mobile can recommend the most comprehensive and hottest information content to users. It can also recommend different information content to each user based on the user's usage behavior, scenarios, personal interests and other information. Artificial intelligence makes Baidu Mobile "different for each user."

Why is the content ecosystem market so popular?

The monetization of information flow is very direct. Compared with the advertising model of traditional portals, the content ecology era has given birth to emerging business models such as native advertising, appreciation, application distribution, and internet celebrity economy. Information is always a rigid demand. In the era of mobile Internet , the demand for consuming information through mobile phones is even stronger. At the same time, the production and consumption patterns have undergone tremendous changes, leaving many opportunities.

Facebook, which mainly uses information flow advertising, is a global Internet giant. Domestically, although Tencent started late, the growth of its information flow advertising is also astonishing. Toutiao has exceeded its annual revenue target of 6 billion this year and may reach 10 billion. Its 2020 target is 10 billion U.S. dollars. Its valuation exceeds 10 billion U.S. dollars, which exceeds the total market value of portal media businesses. Weibo has successfully entered the $10 billion club thanks to its content strategy.

Therefore, considering Baidu's current user scale and the explosive growth momentum of its information flow products, it is no exaggeration to regard information flow advertising as the next growth point.

It cannot be ignored that in addition to information flow advertising, personalized recommendations in information flow may also provide a better model for Baidu to connect to more services. The content industry is the focus of the mobile Internet . Because mature tools are already available, the next focus will be to "infuse" content and services into the mobile Internet. BAT are all focusing on the large content industry. Information is actually one of its branches. Advertisements can be embedded in information, as can goods and services.

Where is BAT aiming with its content ecosystem layout?

In this trend, the top ten giants have all laid out their content ecosystems. In addition to the mobile clients of the five traditional portals (Tencent, NetEase, Sina, Sohu and Phoenix), there are also two emerging entrepreneurial stars: Toutiao and Yidian Zixun. As well as Alibaba , Baidu, and Weibo.

Tencent has two legs in its content ecology: its own content, namely the portal with Tencent.com as the main body, and platforms such as WeChat public accounts, Tiantian Kuaibao, and QQ public platform .

At the same time, Tencent has WeChat and QQ, which are themselves a huge mobile traffic portal. This is the focus of content producers. The attractiveness of traffic to media and self-media is unquestionable. By attracting high-quality content producers and then guiding more high-quality content through a healthy content monetization model, it attracts users and forms a positive cycle.

Alibaba's content ecosystem is mainly supported by Weibo, UC Headlines and big entertainment (music, Youtu, literature, sports and other sectors headed by Yu Yongfu). Weibo, which has both social and media attributes, removed the 140-character limit this year and fully transformed into a content platform. The UC Browser, which was acquired by Alibaba, launched the "UC Toutiao Account", which was listed alongside emerging businesses such as Alibaba Cloud in Alibaba's financial report. It can be said to be a highlight of Alibaba's content ecosystem construction.

Alibaba's main advantage lies in e-commerce content such as "Taobao Headlines", and its huge traffic advantage makes content very effective in directing traffic to goods. In fact, Weibo's self-media revenue of 11.7 billion this year came from e-commerce, of which more than 10 billion came from e-commerce, which also shows the value of e-commerce to content monetization.

However, Alibaba currently lacks a super entry-level platform like Baidu Mobile, Toutiao or WeChat QQ. Taobao Mobile and Alipay have a large user base but are not suitable for comprehensive content distribution. There have even been rumors that Alibaba may acquire Toutiao. I think this rumor has its logic.

In short, content ecology is becoming a major variable in the current Internet market and will also be the highlight of mobile Internet in the next one or two years.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow

This article was compiled and published by @罗超由(APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!