When it comes to today's headlines, I believe that many people have this app in their mobile phones, and today I will talk about the controversial Toutiao and his founder Zhang Yiming. People who have seen Zhang Yiming once described him as such, saying that he exudes a student atmosphere, wearing a green plaid shirt, clothes tucked into straight-leg jeans, not tall, and a somewhat thin figure. This outfit doesn't seem to be sticky to the image of the CEO of an Internet company, but this post-80s young man is actually a veteran entrepreneur.
To talk about Zhang Yiming's entrepreneurial experience, it has been more than once or twice. Zhang Yiming, who graduated from Nankai University in 2005 with a major in microelectronics and software engineering, had 8 or 9 attractive company offers in front of him, but he felt that it was too unchallenging and boring to do this work. That year coincided with the arrival of the Web 2.0 era, many Internet people left the company to start a business, Zhang Yiming also felt that this was the only thing.
So he also became one of the first entrepreneurs in the web 2.0 era. At that time, Zhang Yiming formed a three-person team to develop a collaborative office system for enterprise identification and access management, but he was not rich in experience as a newcomer, and the market positioning of the product was wrong, which led to the failure of this venture.
However, that entrepreneurial experience also made Zhang Yiming realize that he needed to find a right direction in Internet entrepreneurship, and to be able to seize this opportunity, after the failure of his first venture, he thought about where he was going. Because I often read the blog of Chen Hua, the founder of the Kuxun website, I feel that this person and myself are like-minded. So Zhang Yiming volunteered to become the first engineer of Kuxun.com.
At first, he got a good exercise in cool training, because he was young and could work day and night, it was common to stay up all night, even if he came home early from work one day, he usually read and study, and he had to stay up until one or two o'clock in the evening.
In this way, Zhang Yiming was quickly promoted to the chairman of the Cool Training Technical Committee and became a backbone member of the company, less than two years after he graduated. Seeing that there are many problems in the management of the company, I want to know how this large company is managed.
So, he left Kuxun in 2008 for Microsoft, and entered such a large enterprise as Microsoft, which may be enough for many people. But when Zhang Yiming entered Microsoft, he felt a kind of discomfort, in his opinion, Microsoft's control over engineering exceeds the realization of ideas, and the most important thing for employees is to follow every detail in the process.
Later, Zhang Yiming looked back on those days and said that it was the most boring year of his career. After working in this way for about a year, Zhang Yiming learned that Fujian Longyan's fellow villagers wanted to establish a restaurant, and this time he was interested.
At the end of 2008, Zhang Yiming joined Fanno as a technology partner, and if you want to say what is his biggest gain there, it should be that he learned to be cautious. Just like today's headline team, although there is no content editor, there is a complete content review team. After the meal closed, Heina Asia approached the door, hoping to fund the creation of a real estate information website by Zhang Yiming.
So in October 2009, Zhang Yiming started his first independent business, founded the vertical real estate search engine Jiujiufang, and Zhang Yiming began to get involved in mobile development in Jiujiufang. In six months, five mobile applications, including handheld renting and handheld buying, were launched, achieving 1.5 million users in the application Internet environment at that time, ranking first in the real estate category. When doing Jiujiufang, Zhang Yiming had a new understanding of the mobile market, and felt that personalized information recommendation was in great demand on mobile phones.
So at the end of 2011, Zhang Yiming resigned as the CEO of Jiujiu.com and started his own entrepreneurship again. The company he founded has a very special name called ByteDance. As the name suggests, the company's products and data are related.
At the beginning, there were only a dozen people in the company, and Zhang Yiming was very clear about everyone's work, but after developing to more than 100 people, Zhang Yiming began to realize that he couldn't manage it. He once said that the biggest feeling after the company grew up was that the pressure became greater. Every day, there are endless things to deal with, I can only go to bed at 11:12 pm, and when I open my eyes in the morning, there is a full screen of WeChat waiting for him to reply.
From this, he also came to the conclusion that the things that can be managed specifically and the things that can be managed through others must be clearly distinguished, and it is very important to put the right people in the right positions. After knowing how to delegate power, Zhang Yiming focused his energy on two things, one is product and technology, and the other is recruitment, these two things he will deal with even small details. But marketing and sales will be handed over to his subordinates, and he has never met a customer.
Today, Toutiao's team has five executives with more than 200 team management experience, and Zhang Yiming can safely delegate power. Now in addition to recruitment, Zhang Yiming is also doing quite well in seeking cooperative financing. In addition to the people in the team, most of them are talked about by him, and no one comes to the door when talking about cooperation.
As for financing, it is said that ByteDance, the limelight in the Internet industry, was the most financed in 2013. Three months after Toutiao's launch, the number of users on both Android and Apple platforms reached six to seven million, and there were about 1 million daily active users. From its launch to 10 million users, Toutiao took only 90 days. And for many months in a row, it topped the app store news category.
Although the number of users is indeed large, netizens also have different opinions on the user experience of today's headlines. Some people say that it is good, the recommended content is what they usually pay attention to, but some people think that it is very general, you have pushed this news is not what I want, there is no interest.
Even so, Toutiao beat many other news apps. Many traditional news apps are not interested, and you may also experience it, although almost all traditional media portals have launched their own news apps. But it feels a little bit cumulative.
The staff of the new media department of such a portal once said that it is difficult to do brilliant without throwing money, and even if you do brilliantly, it is not necessarily popular.
Zhang Yiming has a unique idea for today's headlines, and someone once asked him, saying whether you were from a journalism class before, how can you capture users so accurately? Zhang Yiming's explanation is this, he said, we look at this matter of the media, and many peers are quite different, the art industry has a specialization in this is right, it should be professional people to do professional things.
However, Zhang Yiming is not a journalism professional, but he has a unique vision, like ordinary media will spend a lot of money to hire an editor-in-chief to preside over the overall situation. And Zhang Yiming has figured it out since the day he conceived today's headlines, and resolutely does not invite the editorial team. He believes that no matter how good a newspaper is, it has only one cover, and a good editor-in-chief can only make one style.
Therefore, in Zhang Yiming's model, Toutiao only needs users to log in to the background with a social platform account to quickly analyze their interests by using the data in the social network. Then push news content that matches your interests. In Zhang Yiming's view, this is the best embodiment of user supremacy in the Internet industry and the method for the success of Internet enterprises.
Facts have proved that the layman Zhang Yiming's original judgment is indeed correct, when many traditional media portals have been throwing money on the road of new media application but the response is mediocre, today's headlines killed halfway easily snatched away readers, and it was effortless.
Some people asked Zhang Yiming, saying that you are not afraid of making too many enemies if you play like this? I remember that Zhang Yiming once said that one of the contents of his job was to meet with other media editors to seek cooperation, and he believed that the model of headline news could not survive independently of other media, because he did not do content creation, only content distribution. Therefore, despite its own massive Internet information resources, Toutiao has still established cooperative relations with nearly 100 traditional media, and when recommending reports on the same thing for users, it will give priority to recommending the reporting information of the media that have signed a cooperation agreement, and while introducing the content of major media organizations, they are allowed to place advertisements in a certain position on the page.
In Zhang Yiming's view, although Toutiao has not yet brought direct advertising sharing and other commercial value services to traditional media, more to consider how to make products and experiences better, but Toutiao will do its best to support traditional media that produce content in the future to form a win-win media ecosystem.
But then again, although in your Zhang Yiming's eyes, today's headlines and traditional media do not compete, but also bring traditional media another display platform in addition to itself, increasing the exposure of traditional media's own brand and advertising. However, it seems that the market does not think so.
Since he received $100 million in financing led by Sequoia and co-invested by Weibo, Toutiao has also completed a Series C investment with a valuation of more than $500 million, but since then, the road for Toutiao, a mobile Internet upstart, has not been so smooth.
During that time, traditional print media, news clients, and self-media people carried out various verbal criticisms on copyright and diversion issues, and overnight, today's headlines aroused the outpouring resentment of all media around the world, and this software and Zhang Yiming himself really became the headlines of the industry.
At that time, the Beijing News took the lead in launching a crusade under the title of "Today's Headlines", and in that article, it focused on the copyright issues behind today's headlines. According to the report, as a mobile app client software, Toutiao itself is not the creator of the content of the work, he is famous for collating and forwarding the headlines of the day in a timely manner.
The Beijing News believes that the slogan of today's headlines is, we do not produce news, we are news porters. But in fact, it is not only news, but also copyright, and the so-called news porter actually covers up the fact that he has violated the law. It was from this story that the media began to question the headlines.
At the same time, Guangzhou Interactive Information Network Co., Ltd., which enjoys the right to disseminate the network of Guangzhou Daily, filed a lawsuit against Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd., which owns today's headlines, because of its copyright, requesting the court to order the defendant to immediately delete the article in question on the mobile client it operates, publish a one-month apology statement on the homepage of the application software, and require the defendant to pay corresponding economic compensation. The Haidian District People's Court of Beijing Municipality also held a public hearing of the case in the first instance.
In fact, not only Guangzhou Daily, including Sohu, Tencent, Beijing News, Dayang.com and many other media have clearly asked Toutiao to remove their content. Therefore, Toutiao can no longer jump links to some news websites, and Sohu.com and Tencent.com have also stopped cooperating with Toutiao. In the eyes of many media, the reason why Toutiao has attracted harsh criticism and controversy is that it started by linking the content of traditional media, neither obtaining the authorization of the copyright owner of the captured content, nor paying a penny for this content.
Today's headlines' slogan is, we don't produce news, we are news porters, but the content of traditional media can't just become the headlines of others for free. In addition, Toutiao's transcoding model is also very controversial, this software is based on data mining information recommendation engine, most of the display content it provides is the user clicks, directly open the complete page.
This mode directly accesses the server on the content side without going through the server, and returns it directly to the mobile phone without any modification. However, for some technical reasons, part of the content is transcoded and left in today's headlines server, and then presented after processing, although the original link is marked below, but most of the traffic is directly imported into today's headlines, and this, which is one of the key points of today's headlines.
Ming Zhou and his ByteDance did not stop in the controversy. In September 2016, a new phenomenal product was born, which is Douyin, another fist product of ByteDance after today's headlines. The emergence of this national-level application has really given ByteDance the capital to be on an equal footing with Ali, Tencent, Baidu and other deep-rooted Internet giants.
Over the years, Zhang Yiming's media advertising has become bigger and bigger, and its products include Toutiao, Douyin, Wukong Q&A, Watermelon Video, Volcano Video, Fast Horse, Flower Bear, Qimeng, Tuworm, Che Di, etc., covering short videos, knowledge quizzes, news platforms and many other fields.
Zhang Yiming can't be as meticulous as before. So, in November 2018, he stepped down as CEO of Toutiao, so that he could focus more on ByteDance's strategic layout.
In the 2019 Forbes Global Billionaires List, Zhang Yiming became the first self-made billionaire in China after the 80s with a value of 16.2 billion US dollars, equivalent to about 109 billion yuan, the seventh richest in China, and the second in the Forbes 2022 Chinese mainland Rich List. A new decade has begun, Zhang Yiming can continue to forge ahead, let's wait and see.