3 perspectives to help you understand Toutiao’s content production strategy

Toutiao is a recommendation engine product based on data mining, which provides users with a precise and personalized mobile information platform and realizes the precise connection between content and users. The positioning of Toutiao today is “what you care about is the headline”. Ultimately speaking, Toutiao is a platform that connects content producers and content consumers. Therefore, I would like to analyze its production strategy from three aspects: content positioning, content producers and content consumers.

1. Content Positioning

When it comes to content positioning, it can be discussed from three aspects: product entry point, product differentiation and solving user needs.

1. Product entry point

Toutiao makes full use of its technological advantages, analyzes user behavior based on data mining, and builds a personal reading DNA library for each user. It combines excellent algorithms to recommend news and information content that each user is interested in, solving the problem of information overload in today's society.

2. Differentiation

Unlike other consulting platforms, Toutiao uses various algorithms to recommend personalized information to users that they want to see.

3. Solve user needs

In an era of information overload, Toutiao helps users save time and meets their needs to read information that interests them.

Connecting content producers

Connecting producers means solving two problems: “how to get content” and “how to keep content available”. Continue reading below.

1. Where does the content come from?

(1) Use machine crawlers to crawl content

At the beginning, the content of the headlines came from the summary of news from other portals. Regardless of the engine, its primary task is to accumulate enough data samples through crawlers. Toutiao adopts the model of adding recommendation engine to portal. When users click on the news title , they will jump to the original web page of the news portal. However, for the sake of user experience and to facilitate reading for mobile device users, Toutiao will technically reprocess the web pages of other websites visited, remove advertisements on the original web pages, and only display the content. However, this involves copyright issues, and Toutiao has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in this.

(2) Operating your own self-media platform

During this stage, Toutiao invested real money (10,000 yuan for 1,000 people, 10,000 yuan for 100 groups, etc.) to create the largest self-media author platform in the country. After establishing a Toutiao account , media can upload their own content on the platform, which is equivalent to authorizing Toutiao to distribute the content. From now on, Toutiao no longer has to actively look for the media, but the media can also more conveniently actively look for Toutiao. By now, the total number of Toutiao accounts has exceeded 300,000, and the number of corporate Toutiao accounts has exceeded 33,000. 73% of the content is contributed by Toutiao accounts.

(3) Short videos

Toutiao announced that it has become the largest short video distribution platform in China, and has established the "Golden Second Award" and more funds to support the creation of short videos.

(4) Q&A and Weitou

Q&A is the same as Zhihu, and Weitao is the same as Weibo and Moments .

Incentivizing producers (how to sustain them)

As early as the Toutiao Developer Conference in 2015, Toutiao announced a subsidy plan worth 10,000 yuan to 1,000 people. It will ensure that at least 1,000 Toutiao creators will receive a guaranteed income of at least 10,000 yuan per month. It also opened a content venture capital fund to invest 200 million yuan in the content field and has invested in more than 300 early-stage content entrepreneurial teams. The investment amount in early-stage projects ranges from 300,000 to 1 million yuan.

Not only that, Toutiao has also created a creative space and built a Toutiao self-media incubation space in Beijing, which provides 200 high-quality and low-cost workstations and self-media big-name mentors, as well as financing channels , and provides incubation services from multiple aspects such as space, services, courses, and investment. There will not only be investment funds for content, but also traffic support plans.

Toutiao has also opened a media lab to provide creators with a creative tool that provides content clues to content producers through big data . For example, hot word rankings, hot word trends, and background information needed to report hot events can all be presented on this platform. It will also serve as a reference for self-media people when writing reports.

At the Toutiao Account Conference in 2016, Toutiao announced a very important news that it would provide a 1 billion subsidy for short video Toutiao accounts. Not only that, Toutiao has also considered a profit model for the self-media people of Toutiao. It first selected a group of self-media accounts that can produce high-quality content for internal testing, provided fixed advertising space on the article content pages of the self-media, and provided a profit-sharing plan for advertising.

Connecting content consumers

Connecting content consumers means making users stay on the platform happily. First of all, we need to ensure that users are satisfied with what they see. Therefore, we need to pre-process the content provided by content producers and present the processed content in a good way.

1. How to attract high-quality users (content preprocessing)

If you want to find high-quality users, the most fundamental thing is to provide good content and experience, otherwise even if users come, they will be lost.

(1) Audit mechanism

Toutiao’s review mechanism is quite strict. Graphic and text information is reviewed using a combination of manual and machine methods, while video content is all reviewed manually, with a manual review team of more than 300 people.

(2) Deduplication

Reducing duplication can optimize the user experience. For each user, it is enough to read one article on the same topic.

(3) Information flow push

Every time you pull down or click the homepage button, Toutiao's recommendation engine will update several pieces of news, and it will take many updates before the words "No update yet, take a break" will appear. Compared with a few years ago, the amount of information has increased significantly. The information flow also displays the title, source, number of comments, refresh time and pictures. You can also set whether to display the summary in the list. The content presented on the information flow page is rich enough, with a clear hierarchy, and will not make people feel uncomfortable.

How to display high-quality content (display processed content)

(1) Give him what he wants to see

A recommendation engine is a search engine that displays search content without requiring you to enter keywords. Recommendation engines involve multiple aspects, including user research, text mining, recommendation algorithms, distributed computing, and real-time computing of large data streams. From the moment you enter Toutiao, it begins to collect the time you enter the App, the information topics you actively select, the types of articles you click to view, and the time you stay on each article page. All this information will be collected by Toutiao. It will be so detailed that it will record where you swiped, how many screens you swiped, how long you stayed on each screen, and all your actions.

(2) Negative information feedback

A small cross is set on the information flow page, and a dislike button is also set at the end of the details. After clicking, the user will be asked why he or she is not interested. Although this method can accurately obtain the reasons for negative feedback, it is necessary to recommend information more accurately.

(3) Release threshold

Toutiao has strict publishing thresholds and clear standards for article titles, texts, etc. Any violations cannot be successfully published.

Summarize

Through a brief analysis of Toutiao’s content production, I deeply feel that as a content operator , we must serve as a bridge between users and content. This solves the problems of both producers and consumers, so that one can become a good high-level operator .

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