Toutiao (头条, "headlines") or Jinri Toutiao (今日头条, "Today's Headlines") is a Chinese news and information content platform, a core product of the
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
-based company
ByteDance
ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Haidian, Beijing, and incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
Founded by Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo, and a team of others in 2012, ByteDance developed the video-sharing ap ...
. By analyzing the features of content, users and users' interaction with content, the company's algorithm models generate a tailored feed list of content for each user.
Toutiao is one of China's largest mobile platforms of content creation, aggregation and distribution underpinned by
machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
techniques,
with 120 million daily active users as of September 2017. It is also one of China's largest
demand-side platform
A demand-side platform (DSP) is a concept that combines various software for advertisers (or advertising agencies) to automate the process of buying and selling ad impressions in real time.
This platform provides digital advertising inventory wi ...
s.
History
In August 2012,
Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd. launched the first version of its main product Toutiao.
The content on Toutiao comes from different sources. At first, a large portion of content was created from the Internet. Now, Toutiao currently has partnerships with over 20,000 traditional media outlets, which make up 10% of its feed, and 800,000 new media content creators.
In 2012 and 2013, Toutiao had two earlier rounds of funding by
Susquehanna International Group (SIG) Asia Investment and
Yuri Milner
Yuri Borisovich (Bentsionovich) Milner (, ; born 11 November 1961) is a Soviet-born Israeli entrepreneur, investor, physicist and scientist. He is a co-founder and former chairperson of internet company Mail.Ru Group (later VK), and a founder ...
.
In 2014,
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...
led its Series C funding of US$100 million at a valuation of US$500 million, followed by
Sina Weibo
Weibo (), or Sina Weibo (), is a Chinese microblogging ( weibo) website. Launched by Sina Corporation on 14 August 2009, it is one of the biggest social media platforms in China, with over 582 million monthly active users (252 million daily ...
.
In 2016, Toutiao's number of daily active users reached 78 million.
As of September 2017, Toutiao had 120 million daily active users,
and was reported to be valued at US$20 billion.
In 2019, publishers were reporting 20%+ of their traffic from Toutiao
In 2018 the
(SAPPRFT) asked Toutiao to increase its moderation and demanded that a particular account that SAPPRFT described as "vulgar" be removed from the service.
In 2021, Toutiao had 150 million daily active users, with an average of 87 minutes per user per day.
Features
Algorithm
Toutiao uses algorithms to select different content for individual users. It uses machine learning systems for personalized recommendation that surfaces content which users have not necessarily signaled preference for yet.
Using
natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...
and
computer vision
Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...
, Toutiao extracts entities and keywords as features from each piece of content. When a user first opens the app, Toutiao makes a preliminary recommendation. Toutiao then fine-tunes its models with users' interactions with the app.
Video
Toutiao launched
its video channel in May 2015. Creators can upload their short videos, and the algorithm of Toutiao will recommend videos to users.
In 2016, videos on Toutiao are played 1 billion times per day, making Toutiao China's largest short video platform at the time.
Q&A
In July 2016, Toutiao launched a new channel called Q&A, an open discussion community. Registered users can share their experiences and opinions in specific fields under questions and interact with other users. Toutiao then recommends answers to users in its news feed and Q&A channel.
Toutiao Q&A matches questions with interested users using
natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...
and user profiling, and automatically invites them to answer certain questions.
Fake news moderation
Toutiao identifies fake news by using a combination of human reviewers along with automated analysis of posts and comments.
User characteristics and behavior
90% of Toutiao users are under 30 years old. The average user spends 76 minutes on the site every day, resulting in 1.3 billion articles read every day.
Creator community
In 2013, Toutiao provided a self-publishing platform to media organizations. The platform later evolved into Toutiaohao Account.
As of 2016, more than 350,000 individuals and organizations have started their Toutiaohao Accounts, including administration departments, media organizations, companies and individual writers. They publish 150,000 articles and videos on Toutiao every day.
Social good
Toutiao Alert for Missing Persons
Using location-based notification-pushing techniques, Toutiao initiated a corporate social responsibility project called “Toutiao Alert for Missing Persons”. People can send detailed information of the missing person, including their last known location and time. After a verification process, Toutiao will push notification messages of missing persons to its users within the possible range of their whereabouts.
As of 2016, 700 missing persons have been recovered as a result of Toutiao's users offering clues and notifying authority.
As of February 2017, over 1000 missing individuals have been found using this feature.
Research
Toutiao's research arm, Toutiao AI Lab, was founded in March 2016 and is headed by Ma Wei-Ying.
Its main research areas include
Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...
,
Machine Learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
,
Computer Vision
Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...
and
Human-Computer Interaction.
Xiaomingbot, an AI-powered robot writer co-developed by Toutiao Lab and
Peking University
Peking University (PKU) is a Public university, public Types of universities and colleges in China#By designated academic emphasis, university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education of the Peop ...
, creates articles automatically. It published 450 articles over the course of the
2016 Summer Olympics
The 2016 Summer Olympics (), officially the Games of the XXXI Olympiad () and officially branded as Rio 2016, were an international multi-sport event held from 5 to 21 August 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with preliminary events i ...
.
Investment and globalization
In its domestic market, Toutiao has made an investment to Imaginechina.
Toutiao has entered
Japan
Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...
, the US,
Brazil
Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
and the
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, southeastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and northwest of the Mainland Au ...
n region.
In October 2016, Toutiao gave India's local-language app
Dailyhunt 25 million dollars in its series D funding round.
Toutiao obtained a controlling stake of the Indonesian local-language news app Babe in 2016.
Toutiao's parent company, Bytedance owns TopBuzz in the US and Brazil.
In January 2017, Toutiao acquired the video creation app Flipagram for an undisclosed amount.
After Toutiao's series D financing round at the end of 2016, with investments worth US$1 billion by Sequoia Capital, CCB International and other institutions, Toutiao is reported to be valued at more than 11 billion US dollars.
Controversies
Legality of contents
On June 5, 2014, ''
Guangzhou Daily
''Guangzhou Daily'' or ''Guangzhou Ribao'' (), also known as ''Canton Daily'', is the official newspaper of the Guangzhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party
The Communist Party of China (CPC), also translated into English as C ...
'' sued Toutiao for violating its copyright. The case was settled 13 days later.
On September 16, 2014, the National Copyright Administration affirmed that Toutiao had violated the copyright of traditional media outlets by crawling and serving contents from its own servers; however, the administration also noted that Toutiao has already deleted the relevant contents and started negotiating for a formal license.
On December 29, 2017, the
Cyberspace Administration of China
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC; ) is the national internet regulator and censor of the People's Republic of China.
The agency was initially established in 2011 by the State Council as the State Internet Information Office (SIIO) ...
accused Toutiao and
Phoenix News of “disseminating pornographic and vulgar information, had serious issues of misguiding people, and had an evil influence on the ecosystem of online public discourse”, listing “reposting news in violation of regulation,
clickbait
Clickbait (also known as link bait or linkbait) is a text or a thumbnail hyperlink, link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow ("click") that link and view, read, stream or listen to the linked piece of online cont ...
, and seriously disrupting the order of information flow on the network” as its main offense. In response, Toutiao halted its content update for six of its channels for 24 hours, shut down its “Society” channel, banned thousands of accounts, and started recruiting 2000 more censors.
Privacy
Toutiao has a feature called “people you might know”. In December 2017, users noticed that the feature consistently showed them their contacts, despite not giving permission to either Toutiao or WeChat to read them. When questioned, Toutiao states that it “does not possess, collect or process users' private data”, and “reading users' contacts with their consent is a common practice in mobile Internet business”. On January 11, 2018,
Ministry of Industry and Information Technology
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) is the sixth-ranked executive department of the State Council of the People's Republic of China. It is responsible for regulation and development of the postal service, Internet, wireles ...
asked Toutiao to “abide by the laws and regulations, and only collect necessary personal information legally in a justified manner”.
Fraudulent advertisements
On March 29, 2018,
CCTV-2
CCTV-2 is a Chinese free-to-air television channel operated by China Central Television in the People's Republic of China. The channel broadcasts programs on the business news, economic information, stock market data, business and industry economi ...
reported that Toutiao showed advertisements violating the Advertising Law for dubious or counterfeit products, targeting cities where regulations aren't as tight. One company,
Tong Ren Tang was forced to delist its genuine products by the
CFDA on December 29, 2017, due to the complaints filed by those who bought the advertised counterfeits. Tong Ren Tang stated that they have never advertised on Toutiao, and have filed complaints against such illegal advertisements with Toutiao before, however in some cases Toutiao rejected their complaints, instead responding “Why don't you advertise? If you advertise your genuine products, there won't be any counterfeits,” and when requested for the identities of the advertisers, Toutiao responded “you as a company have no rights to know that”.
During an interview, employees of Toutiao says that as long as one's willing to pay more advertising fee, they don't care if the product is good or not, and if the product is not certified, they'll fake one, and they'll help set up a landing page with legal content which will guide the visitor to the illegal advertisement, and find a proxy company so that when the regulators find out, they can blame the proxy.
Toutiao responded on March 30 saying that the relevant advertisers and proxies have been banned from Toutiao indefinitely, and the employees have been fired. Toutiao says it will soon implement a warning when users are navigating away from contents controlled by Toutiao.
See also
*
Xigua Video (formerly Toutiao Video), Toutiao's
online video platform
An online video platform (OVP) enables users to upload, convert, store, and play back video content on the Internet, often via a private server structured, large-scale system that may generate revenue. Users will generally upload video content vi ...
*
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...
*
Recommender system
A recommender system (RecSys), or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing ''system'' with terms such as ''platform'', ''engine'', or ''algorithm'') and sometimes only called "the algorithm" or "algorithm", is a subclass of information fi ...
*
Machine learning
Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
*
Algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Toutiao.Com
2012 establishments in China
Chinese news websites
Internet properties established in 2012
Chinese brands
ByteDance