Decoding Toutiao’s article recommendation mechanism: What kind of headlines are more popular?

As one of the preferred content distribution platforms for many online media practitioners, Toutiao 's recommendation mechanism has always been an "unsolved mystery". The difference in effective data for seemingly similar articles can sometimes reach hundreds of thousands or even millions, which has become a major uncontrollable factor in KPI assessment.

Today we will analyze the user characteristics and dissemination mechanism of Toutiao and tell you part of the truth of this "unsolved mystery".

Features of Toutiao

Toutiao is an open content platform whose biggest feature is decentralization. Content is recommended by algorithms, which makes it more efficient for users to obtain content of interest; for content producers, content can accurately reach more audiences, but the connection between them and users becomes weaker. Under this model, users only belong to the platform, and self-media can only rely on the platform if they want to make a profit.

WeChat official accounts are a centralized content platform. Each official account is a center, and the number of readers is directly affected by the number of fans. The advantage is that the interaction with fans is stronger. Users belong to the platform and also to each public account, so the official public account can make profits through Guangdiantong , and self-media can also make profits by taking on advertisements.

Therefore, you will see that no matter how bad the content is, it will have a basic reading volume in the official account, but it will be filtered out by the algorithm in the Toutiao account and it will be difficult to generate reading volume. On the contrary, if the official account has few followers, good content cannot guarantee the number of readers, but it will be recommended to more people in the headlines. Data released by Toutiao in January this year showed that the average daily active users reached 78 million, with an average daily usage time of 76 minutes. A considerable amount of reading.

But if you want a high readership, you should first understand the content dissemination mechanism of Toutiao.

Algorithm recommendation trilogy

1. First, the audit

Toutiao’s algorithm contains a library of content that can be blocked, and any matching content will not pass review. Both the title and the text may be the reason for failure to pass the review.

Titles that are too exaggerated, such as [It's actually XX], [It's awesome, XX], or contain sensitive words, such as [The Celestial Empire], [Kim Jong-un], etc., will be returned for revision. Even when some words appear, the system will prompt that submission cannot be made.

It is worth noting that if the article fails to pass the review the first time, it will be returned for revision; based on personal publishing experience, the article will not be recommended even if it passes the review again.

After the article is reviewed, the author can also make modifications and submit it for re-review. The official statement of Toutiao is that repeated modifications after publication are not conducive to the recommendation of the article. It is recommended that authors do not revise the article unless there are major errors, and check the article carefully in advance to get it right the first time.

2. Second, deduplication processing

Reducing duplication can optimize the user experience. For each user, it is enough to read one article on the same topic. The interests of Toutiao users are mainly judged based on user clicks. If similar articles are recommended every time, the experience will inevitably be poor. In addition, this is also a means of protecting originality.

There are two main points worth noting about the de-duplication mechanism. First, if the article is declared original, it will be recommended as the main one , and later plagiarists will be de-duplicated. Since all this relies on algorithms to capture text fragments, plagiarism operations can also bypass the algorithm.

Second, if the originality option is not checked , or the originality is not approved, publishing first will not necessarily give you an advantage. During the validity period (24 hours, 72 hours, or one week, depending on the popularity of the news), Toutiao may choose a more authoritative account as the source. In other words, if a piece of content with high similarity is published by a self-media first without applying for originality, and is published later by an authoritative media such as CCTV News, it is more likely that CCTV News will be chosen as the headline.

In addition to the main text, the title and cover image will also be deduplicated. If the background shows that the recommended amount is zero, it may be that the article has been deduplicated.

The other is similar topic deduplication.

Generally, when following hot topics, the media and self-media will dig into the information behind the hot topics from different angles, but the information behind is limited after all. As mentioned earlier, public accounts are centralized platforms. People gathered in different public accounts are relatively closed, so even the same information can get a good number of readers. Toutiao is a decentralized platform, so only a few articles are needed to cover the entire event.

Therefore, to grab hot topics on Toutiao, firstly, the speed is fast, and Toutiao accounts even have priority over public accounts in publishing; secondly, the angle is unique, such as the high-energy Sister E’s article about the Wang Baoqiang incident.

3. Finally, the recommendation

When users log in through their social accounts, the algorithm will interpret the user's interests, form a user profile , and recommend articles of interest based on the user profile. During the user process, the algorithm will optimize the user portrait based on the user's clicks, searches, subscriptions and other behaviors.

If the user is not logged in, Toutiao will recommend some popular content and then determine the user portrait based on the user's clicks.

After the articles are reviewed and deduplicated, they will be recommended to users in batches.

First, push it to the users who are most interested, and then decide the next batch of recommendations based on the feedback from this group of users. The feedback information includes click-through rate , number of favorites, number of comments, number of reposts, completion rate, page dwell time, etc., among which the click-through rate has the highest weight.

After the first round of recommendations, if the click-through rate is low, the system will consider the article not suitable for recommendation to more users, and will reduce the amount of secondary recommendations; if the click-through rate is high, the system will consider the article popular with users, and will further increase the amount of recommendations.

Similarly, the number of new recommendations for an article is based on the click-through rate of the previous recommendation. In addition, after the article expires, the number of recommendations will significantly decrease. The validity period is usually 24 hours, 72 hours and one week.

In this light, in order to achieve high readership, it is important to increase the click-through rate of articles.

What kind of articles are suitable for headlines?

Let’s first take a look at the user portrait of Toutiao.

In terms of age and city distribution, people aged 18-30 account for nearly 86%, and people in second-tier cities and below account for nearly 73%. Those aged 18-23 are mostly in college, while those aged 24-30 are mostly in the executive level of the workplace. At the same time, they are in small cities where competition is relatively less fierce. They all have one thing in common - they are idle.

When you have free time, you need entertainment. Toutiao fills this demand to a certain extent, while also providing a large amount of news and information to meet users' needs for information.

According to the 2016 mobile information industry segmentation report released by Toutiao, Toutiao's entertainment interest users account for 68.29% of the total number of users on the entire platform, ranking first. Among them, video reading volume has the fastest growth rate and the highest overall reading volume. When publishing this type of content, videos can be given priority, followed by pictures and texts.

The entertainment category is greatly affected by hot events, such as Wang Baoqiang’s divorce case in August last year, which led to an increase in the data for the entire month. This shows the importance of following hot spots.

The second largest category is social information, accounting for 67.29%. The social category is mainly read through pictures and texts. However, it is difficult for self-media to pass social content review, and most of the content is provided by mainstream traditional media. There are the two sessions in March, as well as the hot issue of " THAAD ". This should be a period with higher reading volume of social information this year.

The third largest category is comedy, accounting for 46.56%. The main reading format is video. 95.73% of the articles are less than 1,000 words. Short articles are a major feature of the wide spread of funny articles.

There are also users with interests in current affairs, emotions, fitness, and cars , accounting for more than 20% of the total number of users on the entire platform.

It can be seen that the content that Toutiao users like is mostly time-consuming content, while content such as knowledge-based content that helps users save time is not so popular.

Which specific articles have a high readership?

Taking technology as an example, we selected the recent highly read articles from three Toutiao accounts: Chuangyebang , Huxiu.com, and 36Kr for comparison. In terms of content, they have some common characteristics.

1. Most of the highly read articles are related to well-known people or companies, such as Dong Mingzhu , Liu Chuanzhi, Liu Qiangdong , Wang Xiaofei, JD.com , Huawei, etc.
2. The titles of highly read articles all convey emotions. "I must destroy you", "Life is nothing but a passing moment", etc., especially the articles of Chuangyebang , the number of readers of their articles is higher than that of the other two.
3. Highly read article titles use people’s curiosity to trigger clicks. For example, "76% of Putian shared bicycles were lost in 19 days, scaring away investors ! But the truth is", "In the ten years of JD.com, under Liu Qiangdong, there were two internal power forces and three changes".

Scientific and technological articles are generally longer, so the structure of the article must be particularly clear and in line with people's reading habits. In the above-mentioned high-readability articles, most of them use bold to draw attention to key positions or transition points, which makes it easier for readers to grasp the key points. In addition, inserting pictures is also a good way to relieve reading fatigue.

It is worth noting that Toutiao’s recommendation mechanism makes the title account for a very large weight. For example, this article "Ren Zhengfei responds to layoffs of old employees: Huawei has no pensions and does not support people who eat for free" is an aggregation of news information. Usually, the readership of such articles is very low, but with an attractive title, it does not affect the readers' enthusiasm for the article at all, and the comments are all about their views on Huawei.

In addition to content that is popular with the public, there are some other factors in the recommendation mechanism that affect the reading volume. The official explanation of Toutiao includes these 5 situations:

1. The topic of the article is too unpopular and obscure, and the field involved is somewhat distant from the mainstream masses, resulting in a small potential user base and failure to form large-scale recommendations;
2. The supply of content exceeds the demand. For example, if you follow a hot topic, there will be a lot of similar content. Although the audience is large enough, the number of recommendations allocated to each article is very small;
3. Articles with short validity have a short recommendation time and low recommendation volume;
4. If the growth in recommendation volume does not reach a certain level, even if the click-through rate is high, the number of article readers will not be high because the content has not been verified on a large scale. In subsequent recommendations, if the number of recommendations continues to rise, the number of readings may increase steadily.
5. The account content has a low verticality and does not post in the area in which the account is good at. The machine algorithm will re-identify and classify it before making recommendations, which will take longer.

How to direct traffic to a public account or product?

It is more difficult to divert traffic. The key to divert traffic is not only the number of readers, but also the conversion rate .

This conversion rate is relatively low. Since the number of Toutiao fans is less than 20,000, external links cannot be opened, and the channels to other websites are basically blocked. If users are asked to close Toutiao while reading, open WeChat , search the name and follow the official account, it is obvious that this complicated process will lose a large number of users and the effect will not be very good. Moreover, Toutiao also has some restrictions on the obvious appearance of words promoting public accounts in articles.

Continuously outputting high-quality content can "impress" users and give them enough motivation to follow the official account or product, but the effect is slow to take effect. There are also some tips to increase conversion rates. For example, when interest in an article is high, more detailed content will be introduced, but users will need to follow the official account to see it.

How to make profit from Toutiao?

At present, the main sources of income provided by Toutiao to Toutiao authors include advertising revenue sharing, a 1,000-person 10,000-yuan plan for outstanding self-media, product rebates, and appreciation.

Toutiao officially announced that its total advertising revenue in December 2016 was 36.07 million yuan. Although the number is large, the revenue distributed to each Toutiao account is not necessarily that much.

Judging from the background data, the amount of advertising revenue depends on the number of ads displayed. The factors that affect the amount of ad impressions are the number of readers and whether the article can be read to the end.

Therefore, the first way to increase income is to make your articles as short as possible, about 1,000 words, which is also the length suitable for mobile phone screens. The second is of course to increase the amount of reading.

The second is the original function. Toutiao officially announced that revenue doubled after the launch of original content . This is an operational means to support originality, but it is not known whether it is still applicable. Since last year, Toutiao has invested 1 billion yuan to support short videos , which means that short videos can get more recommendations. Under the dual effects of support and increasing the number of recommendations, the benefits are relatively higher.

Another way to split the business is through the Taobao Affiliate model , whereby a Toutiao account chooses products to add to an article. After a user purchases the product, the Toutiao account will receive a corresponding commission ranging from a few yuan to dozens of yuan. I checked the headlines for a few days, but didn’t see any product promotions in the articles.

Appreciation is also a channel to gain income. But Toutiao is a free reading software, and users lack the habit of paying, so the amount will not be too high.

In the future, there may be more ways to make profits. After all, Toutiao needs to ensure a steady supply of content, so it must give self-media some benefits.

Summarize

This year is the year of the explosion of short videos, and Toutiao has also taken action in this regard - investing 1 billion in subsidies. At the same time, a Sunshine Video entrance is opened on the homepage of the App, which shows its support strength and the efforts in recommending short videos will be increased. Content distribution can also follow the trend.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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