Factoids about Toutiao: Smart News Filtering Service

August 28, 2017

The filtering service Toutiao is operated by Bytedance. The company attracted attention because it is generating money (allegedly) and has lots of users or “daily average users” in the 120 million range. (If you are acronym minded, the daily average user count is a DAU. Holy Dau!)

Forget Google’s “translate this page” for Toutiao, the service is blind to the Toutiao content. A work around is to cut and paste snippets into FreeTranslations.org or get someone who reads Chinese to explain what’s on the Toutiao’s pages.

Other items of interest include. (Oh, the hyperlinks point to the source of the factoid.)

$900 million in revenue (allegedly). Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2017 with a pay wall for your delectation
Funding of $3 billion Crunchbase
Valuation of $20 billion or more Reuters
Toutiao means headlines Wikipedia
What it does from Wikipedia:

Toutiao uses algorithms to select different quality content for individual users. It has created algorithmic models that understand information (text, images, videos, comments, etc.) in depth, and developed large-scale machine learning systems for personalized recommendation that surfaces content users have not necessarily signaled preference for yet. Using Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision technologies in A.I, Toutiao extracts hundreds of entities and keywords as features from each piece of content. When a user first open the app, Toutiao makes a preliminary recommendation based on the operation system of his mobile device, his location and other factors. With users’ interactions with the app, Toutiao fine-tunes its models and make better recommendations.

Founded by Zhang Yiming, age 34, in 2012 Reuters

Technode’s “Why Is Toutiao, a News App, Setting Off Alarm Bells for China’s Giants?” suggests that Toutiao may be the next big Chinese online success. The reason is that the service aggregates “news” from disparate content sources; for example, text, video, images, and data.

Toutiao may be the next big thing in algorithmic, mobile centric information access solutions. The company generates revenues from online ads. The company’s secret sauce include smart software plus some extra ingredients:

Social functions
Search
Video
User generated “original” content
Global plans.

Net net: Worth watching.

Stephen E Arnold, August 28, 2017

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Content processing, News, Online (general)

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.