If you’re a new business in the Chinese media market, or if you know how the advertising industry works in China, Toutiao may or may not have been one of your top choices for platforms to advertise your business on. Toutiao is a popular destination for finding and curating content, offering a new and fresh way for your business to showcase itself with the help of its unique way of displaying ads.
What is Toutiao?
Toutiao is a news-reading app that runs on AI. The news aggregator organizes daily news from various media sources and gives recommendations on the homepage. Some can even say it’s the “most serious app” in China.
Toutiao Advertising
With over 120 million daily users, Toutiao has a somewhat complex algorithm that offers content tailored to its users based on their interest. On a daily basis, over 200,000 articles and videos are published and these appear directly in the feed of the user. Toutiao content is quite diverse as it is news-based and comes from private publishers, official media, and blogs.
Also, part of the advertising revenue is given to the content creators. What makes the platform even better for advertising is that all featured articles and videos are also selected based on the user location. It’s also important to know that users don’t need to follow your account in order to see your content, which is excellent for brand exposure.
Toutiao Advertising Formats
There are 3 different types of ad formats that Toutiao offers, and supports both picture and video display. Ads can be targeted to specific ages, gender, interests, keywords, regions, weather, time, occupations, phone carriers, phone operating systems, phone brands, and types of internet connection. Such a diverge targeting mechanism opens up a lot of opportunities for creative and effective advertising.
Full cover open ads: They cover the entire screen and include options of a wide large screen banner or a maximum of 3 smaller images.
Feeds ads: These come with several advertising styles including ads with text and an image, 3 smaller images, full-width image, image with call extension and app downloads.
Streaming feed ads: These types of ads blend as video format into the Toutiao feed for seamless user experience.
Charges for Toutiao Advertising?
Along with CPM (Cost per mille) and CPC (Cost per click), Toutiao provides 4 new ways for advertisers to bid on the platform including oCPM, oCPC, CPA and CPV.
oCPM/oCPC: oCPM (Optimized Cost per Mille) and oCPC (Optimized Cost per Click) run on the same ad methodology. They are quite similar to CPC, but also include an estimated conversion ratio which is based on audience behavior.
CPA (Cost per Acquisition): In this case, advertisers only pay when there is definite conversion.
CPV (Cost per View): This method only supports video ads. Here, advertisers pay for the number of views when the video ad plays for 10 seconds.
Benefits of Toutiao Advertising
- Toutiao ads allow brands to target groups that have certain apps on their phones. This is great for brands that want niche customers, but this is currently only available for Android phones.
- Geo-targeting options can bring more sales due to the fact that people living in the same areas usually have similar consumer habits. This can be good for a lot of offline retailers.
- Toutiao’s DMP allows brands to upload the audience traits of their existing followers, which brands could then use to find a similar ‘lookalike’ target audience.