How to Reach 35 Million Users Daily With Toutiao Advertising

By: Nicole Ni

Guides

Apr 18, 2017

0 Comments

Advertising
Social Media
Toutiao

Chances are if you’re a foreign business owner new to China, or even if you’ve been in the game for a while now; you’ve probably never heard of Toutiao. Of course, this would be perfectly normal as the platform is relatively new and unless you like to read your news in Chinese; you’re not like going to ever use it.

This is exactly what Toutiao is, a Chinese news curation platform established in 2012. Since then the platform has attracted a lot of attention and has become the largest news curation platform with well over 450 million Chinese users.

Fast track to today, Toutiao has a $11 billion USD evaluation and has recently closed their series D fundraising of $1 billion USD. It has more than 40k official accounts, with 1.1k of them being related to government organizations. There are 35 million daily active users and each of them on average spends about 84 minutes every day reading the news.

Above chart shows that an average Chinese user would spend about 51.5% of their smartphone usage time on reading news which is only second to instant message app (70.1%).

All of this makes Toutiao too powerful of a channel for advertisers, business owners, and marketers to ignore, especially if you’re a B2B company and here is why…

How Toutiao Work

Although Toutiao is a news reading app, but it rarely publishes any original contents. Instead, it simply curates contents from various of media sources and pushes them to the users based on their personal interested and behaviors.

Once a user login, Toutiao uses machine learning algorithms (A.I) to constantly monitor the user’s behaviors and then fine tune the contents that are being served to the user. The more often the user uses the app, the more accurate Toutiao can recommend relevant content to that specific user.

This is similar to what FacebookYoutube(Google) does. Both companies use similar machine learning algorithms to tailor fit their user’s experiences and even serve advertisements to the audience that are going to be most receptive. Making it a huge leverage point for marketers and advertisers.

Here are some of the ways you can target your audience on Toutiao.

Audience gender
Audience age
Audience interest
Keywords
City/region
Time of day
Weather
Occupation
Phone carrier
Phone system
Phone brand
Internet environment

The second reason why Toutiao is a great channel for advertising is because of how users behave on the platform compare to say WeChat. Unlike social media platforms where users are there to chat, connect, and check out what their friends are up to. On Toutiao, users are hungry for information. They want to know what’s happening in the world, sports, and what’s happening in their industry.

On top of that, the demographics that are actively looking to read news will most likely be in their mid-30s to 60s and many of them will be business owners and c level executives; making Toutiao an ideal platform for B2B companies.

Now, let’s talk about how advertising works on Toutiao…

3 Ways to Purchase Ads on Toutiao

Currently, there are only 3 ways that you can bid on ads. You can bid on ads based on a fixed time frame (CPD), Guaranteed Delivery (GD), or the typical Programmatic Bidding strategies such as CPM, CPC, and CPA.

Cost per Day (CPD)

Cost per Day bidding is when you want to display your ads all day long (24hrs). If you choose to use this bidding method to display your ads, you’ll be able to reach on average about 35 million users in a single day, this is because there are currently 35 million daily active users on Toutiao.

For example, let’s say you want to buy a full day of a “full cover opening ad”, which is a type of ad that will pop up as soon as the user opens up the application. This would mean that, the 35 million daily active users would have to watch your ad before they can read their news or anything else.

Guaranteed Delivery (GD)

Guaranteed Delivery means that you as an advertiser will pay for a predefined amount of impression that will be guaranteed by Toutiao. Comparing to CPD, this method of bidding is more conservative, since you are buying a certain amount of impressions instead of a certain time frame.

For instance, if you purchase 1,000 impressions for your banners ads or app download ads. Every time user see your ads after refreshing their feeds will be counted towards your total impression, and this will continue until your guarantee impression are all used up.

Typical Programmatic Bidding Methods

CPM(Cost per 1000 Impression), CPC(Cost per Click) and CPA(Cost per Acquisition) are typical programmatic bidding methods. These bidding methods are available in news feeds ads and many other formats of ads as well.

11 Types of Toutiao Ad Formats

1) Full Cover Opening Ads

Formats: Full screen covered, with options of static-unclickable, static-clickable, dynamic-unclickable and dynamic clickable

Method: CPD

Target: Geographic Info (Province level)

Organically blended into the news. Formats include a screen wide large banner or maximum three smaller images.

2) Feed Ads – Text with Small Image