Breaking down China's most popular news app, Toutiao

One of China’s most popular news apps, Toutiao uses AI algorithms to generate an endless story feed for its 120 million daily users. It’s run by Bytedance, the company behind viral short video app Tik Tok.

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Inside the Beijing headquarters of Bytedance, the company behind Toutiao. (Picture: Bloomberg)

Xinmei Shen

Published: 6:01pm, 2 Oct 2018Updated: 8:08am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

Toutiao may not be a name familiar in the West, but it’s quickly growing into one of China’s most important apps. It has 120 million daily active users, who spend an average of an hour and 13 minutes on it every day -- more than Facebook. Some believe it could be one of the next generation of Chinese tech giants, challenging the big three of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.

Toutiao, which means “headlines”, is a news aggregator. Think of it like Facebook’s news feed -- but without the rest of Facebook. So instead of seeing posts shared by your friends, Toutiao shows you an endless feed of articles and videos recommended by the site’s artificial intelligence just for you.

Toutiao's webpage says "The only headlines are those you care about." (Picture: Toutiao)

How does it work?

There’s no special setup process. The first time you visit Toutiao, you see a list of stories. The story selection can be a little odd -- for instance, as I’m writing this, pinned to the top of the recommended feed was a story on a book about China’s President Xi Jinping. But immediately after it was a video of a pack of dogs killing a boar. Scroll further down, and there’s a post telling you how to spot liver disease through your fingernails (complete with graphic images).

Every post has a small “close” button, which you can tap to dismiss stories you don’t want to read. But Toutiao goes deeper to figure out how to show the right content to users. It learns by tracking your behavior on the site: What you click on, how long you spend on a story, where you stop scrolling, the type of story you’re reading at a certain time of day, even where you’re physically located. All of that is fed into its AI system to come up with recommendations.

Just as notable is what Toutiao is not doing: It’s not using recommendations from your friends. Remember, unlike Facebook, Toutiao isn’t about connecting friends. It has social elements -- you can link your social media profile if you want -- but the stories it serves up come from its AI recommendation system, not from your friends.

So where does all that content come from?

The stories and videos come from over 1.1 million publisher accounts. Some of them are operated by traditional news media, government institutions and companies, but many are from smaller sites or individual content creators. Every day, these accounts reportedly publish around half a million stories to Toutiao every day, whether text or video.