WHEN rumours swirled in August that Baidu, a Chinese online-search giant, was buying Toutiao, the scrappy news-aggregation platform reportedly quipped in response that reports had mistaken the buyer for the seller. The firm is proud with good reason. Toutiao’s growth since its launch in 2012 has been stellar: it says it has already drawn 700m users to the personalised newsfeeds on its smartphone app. Its valuation has shot up, to $22bn in its latest funding round (see chart).
Toutiao’s parent company, Bytedance, is definitely a buyer now. This month it snapped up Musical.ly, a lip-syncing video platform that has captivated American teens, for a reported $1bn. It looks like a good match. Musical.ly, based in Shanghai, is the first Chinese firm to build an app that has been so admired in the West; Bytedance, which has developed sophisticated artificial-intelligence (AI) technology to customise Toutiao’s newsfeeds, can provide it with winning algorithms.
Those algorithms are...Continue reading
from Business and finance http://www.economist.com/news/business/21731416-remarkable-success-smartphone-app-claims-figure-users-out-within-24?fsrc=rss
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