Toutiao Is Copying Zhihu's Q&A Too. Whose Business Will It End Up Taking?

Wukong Q&A is, in the end, one more place for Toutiao to produce and consume content.

Wukong Q&A is an odd product. Unlike video and Toutiao's other lines, it has no single overall lead inside the company — R&D, product, operations and marketing each report up through their own functional heads.

It really doesn't have many users. As of the end of July, the standalone Wukong Q&A app had been installed by a total of 250,000 people. Most of its traffic still comes from the Q&A channel inside the Toutiao app.

But it is also a product that Toutiao CEO Zhang Yiming uses in public. His first activity on Wukong Q&A, a like, was posted on January 7 this year, on the question: What does Sister Hongqiao do?

Toutiao has been at Q&A for a while. From late 2015, Toutiao's own operations staff started asking and answering their own questions as an internal test. On April 7, 2016, Toutiao Q&A launched.

It first showed up in the backend dashboard for Toutiao Account authors. By Toutiao's own account, "Toutiao Q&A" was a collaborative-writing tool where Toutiao Account authors could share their experience and views on a field or a specific question; good answers had a chance of being recommended on Toutiao. The team sent question invitations to active answerers.

But most people learned it existed because of a Moments screenshot posted by a Zhihu influencer who goes by "Demon Daddy."

Toutiao, he said, had already poached 300 influencers, paying better than a white-collar salary, and signed authors could no longer publish their content on Zhihu.

Toutiao's reply: "We have signed more than 300 answerers, but we have never barred anyone from publishing content on other platforms." Zhihu's: "Valuable knowledge-sharing cannot be achieved by crude mass production, and it cannot be priced in bulk. But good content and outstanding content creators will always be well rewarded on Zhihu."

In fact, according to what QDaily heard from several Zhihu users who asked not to be named, the number signed with Toutiao does exceed 300. An answer earns 100, 300 or 500 yuan, capped at 24 rewarded posts a month. The agreement does not stop signed authors from continuing to post on Zhihu; it only requires that what they publish on Toutiao appear there first, and not on platforms that compete with Toutiao, such as Zhihu or Tencent News.

WeChat official accounts, it turns out, are not on the list of "entities in competition with Party A."

Riding the noise around the high-pay poaching, a set of posters started circulating on Moments. The faces on them were not celebrity influencers but active Wukong Q&A answerers. The posters rejected "the rational-neutral-objective pose," "putting on airs," "superiority complexes," "contempt chains" and "the moral high ground" — the message, in short, being that Wukong Q&A welcomes everyone.

Look at the posters and it is hard not to read them as a jab at Zhihu.

According to Wukong Q&A's official WeChat account, the material had been ready a month earlier and was not rushed out for this particular episode.

Premeditated marketing campaign or not, Toutiao has clearly started taking Q&A seriously.

This isn't the first time a Chinese internet company bigger than Zhihu has gone into the Q&A business. None of the earlier attempts succeeded, whether by Baidu, by Sina or by startups. Is Toutiao doing anything different this time?

Toutiao Does Q&A the Toutiao Way

As on Zhihu, open Wukong Q&A and the homepage is mostly answers.

We tallied what a new user — not logged in, not registered, opening the app for the first time — sees on Zhihu and on Wukong Q&A. Here are the top ten items on each, on one day.

If you have used Zhihu for years, you may find after logging out that the topics look very different from the ones you follow.

It is hard to tell from the default recommended questions which of the two wants more to keep you there burning time. The differences are in the product details.

As with articles on Toutiao, Wukong Q&A pushes answerers to pair their content with pictures when it signs them, and says so explicitly in the agreement. While browsing, we saw plenty of answers padded with photos of attractive women that had nothing to do with the text, there to pull clicks.

From Zhihu to Weibo, answerers who asked not to be named said Wukong Q&A staff had reached out to them by May or earlier. A Weibo influencer in the archaeology category told us the staffer who came for her needed only three sentences to sign her: follow her Weibo, invite her in, sign the contract.

The operator of an institutional account told us that from May they stepped up their work on Wukong Q&A, then still called Toutiao Q&A. But the audiences on the two platforms differ enough that they pick different questions to answer on Zhihu and on Wukong Q&A each day. Even without an exclusivity clause, what they write for Zhihu does not go straight onto Toutiao Q&A, and the other way round.

Looking at the questions on the homepage, we found answers on Wukong Q&A were more likely to be copied out of Baidu Baike with an eye-catching image attached — content that goes for attention rather than quality.

It is not hard to see why. Wukong Q&A doesn't show an answerer's experience with a topic next to the answer. The app homepage has a dedicated tab where writers can filter for questions they want to take, and while you browse answers an "Answer" button floats in the bottom right corner of the screen. In short, it is simply easier to start answering on Wukong Q&A.

On Zhihu, before you write an answer, the site encourages you to fill in your experience with the topic. So in a full answer, besides the short bio the answerer sets on their profile page, you also learn how the answerer relates to the topic — why they can answer this question, rather than answering for the sake of answering.

What Wukong Q&A cares about more is the read count on each piece of content, a number Zhihu has never disclosed in its six years online, promoting upvotes instead. And on Zhihu, upvotes from different people carry different weight on the same piece of content.

Wukong Q&A Is to Toutiao What Baidu Zhidao Is to Baidu

Last week a push notification from Wukong Q&A read: "Who shouldn't eat eggplant?"

The same question, word for word, is on Baidu Zhidao.

Search that topic on Baidu's mobile web page and half the screen fills with Q&A results from Baidu Zhidao. For Baidu this is a way to keep users on its own site, and once they click in a few ads can go in too.

For Toutiao the logic is not so different.

Very, very few people have installed the standalone Wukong Q&A app. Installs came to just 250,000 by July, according to mobile-data provider Aurora Mobile — one-hundredth of Zhihu's. By Baidu Index, the quarrel with Zhihu bought it three minutes of fame, and the numbers have already fallen back.

People mostly meet Wukong Q&A inside the Toutiao app, a place with an enormous number of users: by July this year Toutiao claimed 170 million monthly active users. Scroll the recommended feed on the homepage and Wukong Q&A content turns up at least once every ten or so items.

It looks much like the text-and-image news in the feed, except that the source line in the bottom left reads "Wukong Q&A" in small gray characters, easy to miss unless you look.

In the dedicated Q&A section, alongside the Q&A there is some Xigua Video material, and the headlines all have the same flavor: "What's the funniest coach you've ever had?" or "Why is the Forbidden City's Cold Palace closed to visitors?"

Articles, video, Q&A — whatever the format, the products under Toutiao are all doing the same thing.

When a news story blows up, Wukong Q&A's operations staff invite the people involved to register on Wukong and answer questions.

After the tiger attack that injured a visitor at Badaling Wildlife Park, Toutiao Q&A's operations staff tracked down the injured woman. After the recent death of Li Wenxin, a young job-seeker in Tianjin, Wukong Q&A's operations staff found a fellow pyramid-scheme victim who had shared a room with Li, registered and verified him, and had him post an answer.

A job posting shows that the duties of a Toutiao Q&A operations specialist include "organizing the timely production, distribution and promotion of relevant Q&A content around trending news and events."

When there is news, they work the news. When there isn't, Wukong Q&A's content is jokes, health tips and photos of attractive women.

What Toutiao Cares About in the End Is Traffic and Time

One big reason Zhihu succeeded early on is that its design and its operations both stressed the presence of the person behind an answer — why this person is fit to answer this question — while various mechanisms discouraged chasing eyeballs and downweighted glib, clever-sounding answers. Today's Zhihu community is nowhere near as strict on any of these counts, but the person is still an important dimension.

Baidu Zhidao, Sina iAsk, then one startup after another: company after company has taken on Zhihu in Q&A, and not one of them built a community the way Zhihu did, by putting weight on the author.

Search "Wukong" on Zhihu and you can easily find Wukong Q&A's marketing director. On Wukong Q&A itself you can still only search questions; you cannot search for any user's name.

The other thing that shapes the atmosphere of a community is the questions. To this day Zhihu leans heavily on human intervention in its questions.

Toutiao is willing to spend money. But the money all goes to buying answers, and it asks nothing of the questions.

More than one Zhihu influencer poached to Wukong Q&A told us that when they signed, 500 words an answer looked like little effort — then they looked around and could not find a question worth answering.

What Toutiao is buying is not knowledge, not a community, and certainly not a knowledge community. What it is buying is the content these people produce.

Q&A began as a side feature of Toutiao Accounts.

Toutiao Accounts are something like WeChat official accounts. They got going just as several portals fell out with Toutiao, which meant Toutiao stood to lose an important source of content.

Toutiao's response was direct: it raised the slogan "1,000 people, 10,000 yuan" and started paying authors a salary.

With it came an incubator called the Toutiao Account Creation Space, which provided office space and other support. To settle image rights, Toutiao also invested in the stock-photo service Dongfang IC, giving Toutiao Account authors free pictures.

By November 2016, more than 390,000 individuals and organizations had opened Toutiao Accounts.

Toutiao and Wukong Q&A, closely tied as they are, work the same way: poach people from other platforms. Not just Zhihu — Weibo is just as common a source. There are also people with influence in their own fields, where follower count is not necessarily the measure.

Video does the same. Huoshan Video, Toutiao's short-video platform, announced it would spend 1 billion yuan over the next 12 months subsidizing UGC short-video creation on the platform. Then came word that it had paid 20 million yuan to poach MC Tianyou from Kuaishou, and rumors of a list of streamers with more than 5 million followers it planned to take.

Spending on content is how Toutiao holds on to users and keeps them scrolling through its feed.

How many ad slots Toutiao has depends on how long a user stays and how far the screen scrolls down — the longer the scroll, the more slots.

In 2016 the industry generally reckoned Toutiao took in at least 6 billion yuan for the year; this year its target is more than 15 billion. None of that ad revenue is shared with authors.

After news of Wukong Q&A's poaching broke last week, Zhihu said: "Valuable knowledge-sharing cannot be achieved by crude mass production, and it cannot be priced in bulk."

But what Toutiao is paying for is not "valuable knowledge-sharing" in Zhihu's sense. It is content that keeps users around.

Tencent's online media business is now remaking itself, and Baidu has turned its search app, Mobile Baidu, into something much like Toutiao, on the same advertising model.

Against competitors like Tencent and Baidu, which bring their own traffic, Toutiao is buying more content that suits its users, to hold on to the users it has drawn in.

Q&A, photo galleries, articles, video — for Toutiao they are all ways to keep users and get them to use it more.

Cover image from Visualhunt, mripp via VisualHunt.com / CC BY