姜小白对《Attention Factory》的笔记(3)

99房

Above: The 99Fang real estate news and article aggregation app.

The technology behind the service was basic, but it fulfilled a real need and proved popular. Aggregation of information from thousands of sources into a single feed on a smartphone had great potential. Technology could be used to extract, filter, and surface the most relevant information much faster than any human could hope to achieve. Yiming saw they had hit upon something with great potential and that building this kind of app just for the real estate sector was thinking too small.

In hindsight, it is clear that 99Fang’s “Real Estate Information” app was the direct predecessor of ByteDance’s early flagship app Toutiao ( Today’s Headlines ). The layouts, product logic, and even the newspaper logos are similar. The strategy of building a suite of apps that supported each other would also be taken over and used to significant effect at ByteDance.

“One well-established name that ByteDance did accept investment from was Weibo, which joined during the Series C round. Weibo had beaten Yiming’s former employer Fanfou to win the crown title of “Twitter for China.” That meant they could offer ByteDance a vast amount of data. Weibo opened up its APIs 64 —the intermediaries that allow different apps to interact—allowing Toutiao to access Weibo’s user data and activity, such as comments.

If a user logged into Toutiao with their Sina Weibo account, ByteDance would analyze their Weibo interests and reading preferences within seconds and use that insight to personalize the recommendations. It wasn’t until later that Weibo came to realize ByteDance was a competitor. It eventually shut down the rival’s access to its data and sold its shares in ByteDance.

You might ask how could one of the biggest names of the Chinese internet, Weibo, have failed to realize that ByteDance was its competitor? The answer was much for the same reasons that none of the best minds in venture capital took them seriously.

Toutiao was defined as a news aggregator; thus, it was narrowly perceived as merely competing within the class of mobile news apps, a somewhat uninteresting and over-saturated category as far as most of the tech giants and investors were concerned.”

“The key difference between Musical.ly and Vine is that on Musical.ly we lowered the barrier to content creation, so all the consumers are creators at the same time,” explained Alex. As he saw it, lowering the barrier to content creation was critical to Musical.ly’s success, where all content was produced by users.

The most significant barrier to people creating videos wasn’t a technical one. All the new breed of short video mobile apps had easy-to-use mini-editing studios built in. Young users especially had no trouble working out how to add music, text and use the recording function. In particular, Vine’s recording feature was about as simple as one could imagine – point the camera and hold down a button to record for six seconds.

Shyness also wasn’t a problem as many young users loved recording themselves. The more substantial barrier was one of creativity and inspiration—coming up with a concept. Most users need to be inspired. Very few people had as much time, talent, and dedication as already famous Vine stars such as Zach King, notable for his mastery of digital editing techniques to create magic effects.

Music was one form of creative inspiration; on Mindie or Musical.ly, people could easily choose a favorite track to mime or dance to. But the Musial.ly team found that the promotion of daily challenges was a much more effective way to build a regular habit of content creation. Users didn’t need to think that much. All they had to do was follow the crowd and add their spin on an already familiar theme. Copying others wasn’t just okay; it was actively encouraged.”