Chapter 560: Headline Channel

Tonight’s Headline was furiously accused of infringement by Sohu, and all its promotions were pulled offline and online.

Logically, their new user growth should now plummet.

Without advertising channels, it isn’t possible to magically acquire new users, a fact so simple even a fool could understand.

Yet, according to app market download data, reality has completely defied his logical predictions.

Internet data tools show that Tonight’s Headline’s user numbers are rising fast. While not as high as UC or Baidu, the growth trend is startling.

Moreover, their daily active user count is astonishingly high, now trailing right behind Tencent.

He Xiaopeng immediately re-downloaded Tonight’s Headline and scrolled through it all night without sleeping.

[Just a casual scribble]

[I’m just a trader]

[I don’t understand this high-end industry at all]

[I don’t know what direction to take, trying to learn a thing or two from President He]

The voice of Jiang Qin echoed in President He’s mind, tangling his thoughts into a mess.

The next morning, the temperature in Hangcheng notably warmed up, with morning sunlight feeling quite gentle.

Lu Zhichuan came to the office with lunch made by his wife and encountered He Xiaopeng, who was anxiously hurrying into the elevator.

“President He, how about a cup of coffee?”

“No time now, maybe at noon, President Lu.”

With a furrowed brow, He Xiaopeng hastily departed, making Lu Zhichuan tense.

Damn, is he about to lay off people?

His expression almost mirrored Wu Bo’s face when he returned from the group-buy conference.

Lu Zhichuan followed quickly, all the way to the UC Mobile Business Group’s meeting room, where several key executives of UC had already gathered.

They weren’t meeting or speaking, just sitting there refreshing the news in silence.

In the internet business, having benchmark products is essential; they provide a direction and boost motivation. UC’s benchmark had always been Baidu.

The synergy of browsers and news feeds perfect for driving traffic is true in both the PC and mobile eras.

They hold competitive analysis meetings every week, focusing on Baidu, Sohu, or Tencent.

But this time, everyone was silently browsing Tonight’s Headline.

“President He, what’s going on?”

“Last month, Tonight’s Headline’s user growth surpassed UC.”

“?”

Lu Zhichuan was stunned: “Hadn’t Tonight’s Headline paused its promotions last month?”

He Xiaopeng nodded: “Indeed, no promotions were done, but user fission was ongoing.”

“What is fission?”

“It’s this row right here, the one-click share.”

He Xiaopeng pointed to the row below, featuring small icons for WeChat, QQ, QQ Zone, Zhihu, and Sina Weibo.

The articles on Tonight’s Headline are subjectively strong and highly controversial.

This and the sensationalistic clickbait style attract attention almost equally, but click into Tonight’s Headline articles, and you encounter sheer arrogance and prejudice.

After the update with the one-click share feature, many users began sharing articles on social networks.

These heavily biased articles easily spark controversy elsewhere.

Many casually browsing through social networks would stumble upon extremely prejudiced articles and immediately click through.

“Let me see what this is about.”

Then, midway through the article, it redirects to a download page. To continue reading, you have to download the app!

This mechanism of user fission is why Tonight’s Headline’s user base has skyrocketed.

This tactic may seem typical years later, even overly used by many internet firms.

But at the beginning of the mobile internet era, with the ecosystem still forming, this strategy was quite innovative.

Lu Zhichuan tried the one-click share with a post about how to pamper women and shared it on his Weibo. Then, he understood.

“It thrives by leveraging the social matrix to hatch its product, dragging in more users through each one.”

“Yes, but that’s not key. What’s terrifying is its high daily activity…”

“?”

The previous night, after returning from dinner, He Xiaopeng thought the data was wrong when he saw Tonight’s Headline’s consistent daily active and new user curves.

A piece of software’s content can’t be liked by everyone. That’s damn eerie.

Then He Xiaopeng re-downloaded Tonight’s Headline and binge-browsed all night to finally grasp the real issue.

Version 1.0 of Tonight’s Headline was all about multidimensional information flows, akin to the debates about whether eating apple peels causes cancer or not eating them lacks nutrition—always controversial views.

From another angle, this platform’s news differs from mainstream news apps in terms of freer content.

Initially, recommendations were tag-based, not very precise in personalization.

However, after takeover by a specialist team and continuous development over eight months, the single-platform algorithm has matured significantly, and its uniqueness is now evident.

Initially, He Xiaopeng didn’t notice anything special, just that Tonight’s Headline’s homepage suggestions were indeed uniquely angled.

But the more he scrolled, the more inappropriate it seemed. Damn, why was it all stuff he liked?

He got more excited and engrossed as he continued, and before he knew it, it was dawn.

Then, he realized it was an innovative algorithm.

Tonight’s Headline was developing algorithms quite different from traditional internet search algorithms.

On the user end, they no longer matched search terms but completely abandoned targets, starting to match users’ browsing histories instead.

Then the algorithm would match articles based on these histories, curating a personalized headline for each user.

A few minutes later, executives in the meeting room put down their phones.

Their version of Tonight’s Headline had taken shape.

Apart from some “major event” news and “social hot topics,” everyone’s homepage articles were unique, even changing upon each refresh.

Lu Zhichuan also took out his phone and compared with others, finding his hot recommendations were indeed tailored specifically for him.

“It’s the headlines that concern you that are the real headlines.”

Everyone couldn’t help but recall the phrase from Tonight’s Headline’s launch screen and suddenly understood.

Initially, they believed it was merely a crafty slogan.

After the group-buying wars, many had heard that Jiang Qin had marketed Nongfu Spring as “nature’s porter” and defined the product positioning of “Giada” around fearing heat.

And for brands like Burger King and Kang Master…

So, crafting a clever slogan for his app was nothing for a marketing genius like Jiang Qin.

But it was only now they realized the slogan wasn’t just another line.

Through algorithmic recommendations, Tonight’s Headline made each person’s headlines truly their own—all the articles were ones you enjoyed reading, which was truly fearsome.

And so, articles with conflicting views were no longer an issue, as these differing opinions were pushed only to diverse audience sets.

Those who liked peeling apples would only see articles about how not peeling them can cause cancer, while those who didn’t peel saw articles emphasizing how nutritious it was to leave the peel on.

Looking at the solemn faces of UC Mobile Business Group’s executives, Lu Zhichuan was confused.

About algorithms and such, his knowledge was minimal, but he had one question.

Was UC, like Lashou, stumbling in the dark, chased by dogs?

[Those who’ve never managed a news platform probably shouldn’t start now]

[Everyone has their weaknesses]

[Tonight’s Headline articles are contradicting each other]

[He’s quite sincere, really like how a college student should be]

Remembering the meal from yesterday, He Xiaopeng thought to himself, is that what they call a sincere college student?

“This precision is frighteningly high, not even search engine keyword matching can achieve this.”

“Exactly, what keywords formed from users’ browsing history end up matching with articles?”

“Is it done by headline matching? That doesn’t seem feasible.”

“You can’t possibly need to analyze the entirety of contents and then generate keywords to match against user preferences, can you?”

Listening to the discussion around him, He Xiaopeng turned off Tonight’s Headline and silently opened Jiang Qin’s WeChat Moments.

They had added each other on WeChat yesterday, and Jiang Qin had just updated his Moments with a new nine-image post.

Copywriting: “Yan Shuang Ying is really nice to watch.”

The photos below showcased interiors of a certain internet café, including a screen displaying Yan Shuang Ying and a desk with a half-empty 1.5-liter bottle of a budget happy bucket.

And right then, Jiang Qin was indeed sitting in the net café, having just finished watching the finale of Yan Shuang Ying.

Beside him, Cao Guangyu had just been headshot in a game, cursing furiously, astonishingly high in maternal mentions.

“Old Jiang, when will you take me for a round at Tencent?”

“What for? To buy QQ coins?”

“Had dinner yesterday with Alibaba folks, and I bluffed President Lu so bad he was totally stunned. He definitely hasn’t encountered a rich second generation as brazen as me, and I’m getting addicted to this.”

Jiang Qin nonchalantly responded with “next time,” then accessed the internal management system to approve several budget requests.

The trial operation of the Kyoto cold chain had ended, and the feedback data list was sent over too; Jiang Qin quickly approved it after a glance.

Simultaneously, Nana sent over a new document, titled “Optimization Completion of the Content Creation Platform, Headline Channel,” which included a platform link.

Jiang Qin clicked into it and reviewed sections like the Content Creation Zone, Data Monitoring Zone, Comment Management Zone, Fan Analysis Zone, and Advertising and Revenue Zone.