Here is Why Toutiao is the Most Interesting App on the Planet

When in November, China’s Toutiao bought Musical.ly in a deal worth $800M-$1B, it changed the future of global media. This is because Musical.ly is a trending app among global youth, in particular teens. With Chinese tech giants having little presence overseas and in the West, China’s most addictive news app Toutiao, is showing it can do it.

Bytedance, a Beijing-based tech company, owns Toutiao and stands a good chance of becoming a digital media giant in the new attention economy that’s transforming the future of media and mobile. It is valued at $20 billion and the app in 2017 showed impressive sticky numbers for user growth and retention.

Bytedance can own the emerging web, where content consumption habits and fast growing mobile growth resembles China just a few years ago, and its made important acquisitions to do just that as it ventures more into artificial intelligence. Out of all the unicorns in China, Bytedance is one of the companies that most bears watching in 2018.

The app called Jinri Toutiao or “Today’s Headlines”, is not known to much yet English speakers, yet in a few short years it has thousands of media partnerships and between 100-120 million daily active users. More importantly is the amount of time per day they spend on the app. Bytedance is also neither funded by Tencent or Alibaba, and represents just one of the new kind of tech startups coming out of China recently.

In fact, Toutiao goes head-to-head vs. Tian Tian Kuai Bao and Tencent News and appears to be winning. Since they use algorithms and not only human editors, they have AI on their side. Toutiao is synthesizing app consumption trends and moving quickly into Quota-style question-and-answer posts, short videos, and even live-streaming to tap into a young Millennial audience.

The machine learning in the app creates a customized newsfeed based on your in-app behavior and reading preferences, that enables ByteDance to keep users active on the app with a “you are who your friends and what you read” approach. This is exciting because Tencent’s WeChat is already the best at in-app retention in the world, but ByteDance is winning in the ultra competitive app content consumption ecosystem in mainland China.

With a fresh round of funding by Sequoia Capital and CCB International, Toutiao is not the news-aggregator your grandmother told you about, but represents a new breed of digital Empire, and if Bytedance can aim at places such as India and Indonesia it could go global in ways Tech firms haven’t necessarily in the past been known for doing.

Make no mistake, Bytedance could be to News and content as Alibaba is to retail and the cloud in Asia. While it’s unlikely that Bytedance is profitable yet, in 2018 it plans to hit upwards of US$7.6 billion in advertising revenue. With aggressive expansion and hitting the global market with its product, this could be the product that is your one-stop place for content and the winner of how mobile consumption will continue to trend to short videos.

As for the incredible user activity we mentioned, according to Bytedance’s LinkedIn, the average user time per day sits at a staggering 76 minutes, with the average user starting the app nine times per day, which ranks top among Chinese Internet firms in use time and traffic volume. In 2018, you can expect Bytedance to make headway in Asia, as well as places like Brazil, India, Japan and even the United States.

I’m a futurist with a special interest in technology and China’s role in it. With the Huawei deal to sell phones through AT&T in US recently falling apart, we can expect Chinese tech firms to increasingly be in the news.

In 2018, Toutiao will be one of the most interesting apps to watch. According to Technode, Bytedance boldy states:

• Revenue for 2018 is expected to be around RMB 50 billion
• 50% of time spent on Toutiao is on watching videos
• 50% of revenue could come from overseas in five years’ time
• A million content creators produce 20 million pieces of new content per day
• 90% of content is moderated via AI, the rest by humans (though they will hire 2,000 human editors as well).

Currently, Toutiao has expanded into Japan, India, Brazil, North America and Southeast Asia. And, it's not going to stop there.