【华尔街日报】当你读今日头条时，今日头条也在读着你

当你读今日头条时

今日头条也在读着你

作者：Li Yuan
译者：邓小雪 & 倪停

校对：鲁城华

策划：周树人

The News Reads You in China—and People Can’t Get Enough of It

让人上瘾的“新闻定制”

本文选自 The Wall Street Journal | 取经号原创翻译

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Online news in China may be heavily censored by the government, but that isn’t diminishing the voracious appetite for it from China’s mobile users.

网络新闻在中国被严格审查，但这并没有减少中国手机用户对于新闻的巨量需求。

Apps that use algorithms to scour tens of thousands of sources to find news and tailor feeds to individual users are the country’s fastest-growing mobile segment, sparking an industry-wide war to grab users’ precious screen time.

利用计算机 算法 按照用户喜好自动筛选推送新闻的APP成为中国增长最迅速的移动端市场，各生产商为争夺用户宝贵的阅读时间而展开激烈竞争。

algorithm /ˈælgərɪðəm; ˋælɡəˏrɪðəm/ n. a precise rule (or set of rules) specifying how to solve some problem

Take Yang Dong, a 39-year-old construction contractor in the southern city of Shenzhen. He spends one to two hours a day on Jinri Toutiao, or Today’s Top News, reading up on sports, finance and technology. Articles are curated for him by Toutiao’s deep-learning computers that monitor his reading habits and customize content accordingly. Mr. Yang counts on Toutiao to update him on his favorite soccer teams.

举个例子，39岁来自深圳的建筑承包商杨东（音译）每天花1~2小时阅读“今日头条”，他关注的话题主要是体育、金融和科技领域。“今日头条”利用深度学习计算机来监控他的阅读习惯，并据此定制为其推送的新闻内容。杨先生从“头条”获取他最喜欢的足球队的新闻。

Shen Yun, a programmer at a big data company in Beijing, spends up to three hours on the app reading international and technology news during his commute. Toutiao has learned that Mr. Shen, 27, watches videos of funny stunts before going to bed, so has some ready for him when he opens the app at night.

在北京一家大数据公司做程序员的沈云（音译），每天会利用3小时的通勤时间从APP上获取国际及科技新闻。“头条”了解到27岁的沈先生每晚睡觉前会看一会搞笑视频，因此在他每晚打开APP时都会推送相关内容。

Successes like these have propelled Toutiao’s developer, Beijing Bytedance Technology, to be valued at more than $20 billion based on its latest fundraising round, according to a person familiar with the matter—almost double its valuation of $11 billion at the end of 2016.

一位业内人士表示，“今日头条”的成功为其开发商“北京字节跳动科技有限公司（Bytedance）”在新一轮融资中获得了200亿美元，与2016年的110亿美元相比几乎翻了一倍。

News apps enjoyed the highest year-over-year growth rate in June for accumulated time mobile users spent on online products. At 72.7%, it beat online travel and mobile video, the other two fastest-growing categories, according to mobile internet data service provider QuestMobile.

根据QuestMobile移动互联网数据服务供应商的报告，随着手机用户花在在线产品上的时间越来越多，6月份新闻类APP的同比增长率创下新高，达到72.7%，超过了另外两类同样也是快速增长的类别——在线旅游和手机视频。

Such demand has sparked intense competition, attracting Chinese internet giants such as Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Baidu Inc. as well as five long-established news portal sites. All are investing in machine learning to push personalized content based on thousands of data points that can include a user’s location, smartphone brand, past browsing history and time spent on each article.

巨量需求引发了激烈竞争，吸引了腾讯、百度等中国互联网巨头和五大新闻门户网站的参与，利用机器自主学习，根据位置、手机品牌、浏览记录和每篇文章花费的时间等用户大数据来定制个人化的推送内容。

But news feeds in China look very different to those curated by Facebook and Google. For a start, the definition of news is much broader in a nation where people largely ignore the heavily censored state media and its ideological preachings.

但是，中国的新闻推送与Facebook和 Google非常不同。开始的时候，对于新闻的定义是广泛的，人们会忽略严格审查的官方媒体及其所传达的意识形态。

These news apps aggregate content not just from traditional news outlets, but also video sites, live video streaming , social media and a growing army of individual creators. By supplying endless personalized content, the apps want the users to stick around as long as possible. That way, they’ll be more likely to click on the in-feed ads, a growing market.

这些新闻APP不止集合了传统的新闻报道，还包括视频网站、 直播视频 、社交媒体以及越来越多的个人播客。通过提供无穷无尽的个人化内容，APP希望用户的使用时间越长越好。这样一来，他们就更有可能点击弹出广告，这是一个很有前途的市场。

live video streaming 直播视频

While this isn’t so different from the competition in the U.S. between the traditional media and the likes of Facebook, Twitter , Snapchat and Google, artificial intelligence plays a bigger role in China’s online news industry as news apps fill the void in authoritative content.

在美国，传统媒体与Facebook、Twitter、 Snapchat和 Google展开竞争，这点与中国并没有明显不同，但是在中国，人工智能在网络新闻领域发挥了更重要的作用，新闻应用填补了权威新闻内容缺乏的真空。

Collapsing traditional media, stringent censorship and bans on many foreign news sources mean that these apps have to look far and wide to discover content, something machines can do better and more efficiently than humans. In the U.S., aggregated news feeds heavily feature mainstream media.

在中国，传统媒体的衰落、严格的审查制度和对海外新闻来源的禁令，使得新闻应用不得不全方位发掘内容，而这些工作机器比人做得更好而且更有效率。而在美国，聚合新闻的内容 大部分来自于 主流媒体。

feature ： UK ['fi:.tʃər] US [-tʃɚ] to include someone or something as an important part 以…为特色；给…以显著的地位

Toutiao says it has content partnerships with 20,000 traditional news media organizations, which makes up just 10% of its feed, and 800,000 new media content creators, who are motivated and rewarded by the online traffic they attract.

今日头条称它与2万家传统新闻媒体机构存在内容合作关系，这些内容只占其推送内容的10%，它还与 80万新媒体内容创作者合作， 根据他们吸引的网络流量对其进行激励和奖励。

Amassing 120 million daily active users since it started five years ago, the app trails only Tencent’s news portal site QQ.com. Toutiao ranks fifth among all apps in terms of total screen time, but more importantly, its average user spends more than 70 minutes a day on it, ranking second only to Tencent’s messaging app WeChat.

今日头条经过5年发展，日活跃用户达1.2亿，目前仅 落后 于腾讯的在线新闻门户网站腾讯网（qq.com）。用户使用今日头条的亮屏时间在所有手机应用中位居第五，但最重要的是，今日头条的用户每天在今日头条上花费的时间超过70分钟，仅次于腾讯的实时通讯应用微信。

trail ：[treɪl]  （比分）落后 If a person or team in a sports match or other contest is trailing, they have a lower score than their opponents.

Toutiao booked $900 million in ad revenue in 2016, a fourfold increase from the year before. It won’t say whether it’s profitable or when it expects to turn a profit.

2016年，今日头条广告收入达到了9亿美元，较上一年增长了4倍。但今日头条并未透露是否盈利，也未预计何时实现盈利。

“We have the first-mover advantage,” says Zhen Liu, senior vice president of Bytedance. By accumulating millions of users, Toutiao’s computers have enough data to understand what users want, she says. “AI is like a child. It takes time to build up its intelligence level.”

字节跳动高级副总裁柳甄说：“我们具有先发优势”。今日头条积累了百万用户，拥有足够多的数据使计算机来了解用户的需求，“人工智能就像孩子，需要时间来增强智能水平”。

Founded by software programmer Zhang Yiming in Beijing in 2012, Toutiao approaches the news business from a pure technology perspective. That’s where Toutiao’s success—and some would argue its controversy—lies.

2012年，码农张一鸣在北京创立了今日头条，从纯技术的角度来做新闻业务，这正是今日头条成功之所在，但同时也使今日头条饱受争议。

Toutiao’s algorithm led the company to an underserved market: less-educated people in smaller cities and rural areas, many of whom are accessing the internet for the first time and rely on it for entertainment. The app has been criticized by users, competitors and industry observers for feeding vulgar content and clickbait headlines.

今日头条的算法将其引向了一个尚待开发的市场：小城镇和农村地区受教育程度较低的用户群体，他们中的很多人首次接触互联网，并且主要依靠互联网来寻求娱乐。今日头条此前因为推送 低俗 内容和骗取点击率的标题饱受用户、竞争对手和行业观察家的批评。

vulgar ：UK ['vʌl.gər] US [-gɚ] not suitable, simple, dignified or beautiful; common or not in the style preferred by the upper classes of society 粗俗的；庸俗的；不雅的

Toutiao’s Ms. Liu rejects the notion that their content is of poor taste, saying the algorithms can play a positive role in discovering and distributing useful content (she cites a video on how to raise pigs that drew 20 million views.)

柳甄否认了外界认为今日头条内容低俗的说法，她以一段浏览量达到2000万次的介绍如何养猪的视频为例，称今日头条的算法在挖掘和分发有用的内容方面发挥了正面积极的作用。

To be sure, Toutiao isn’t the only news app being criticized for falling afoul of moral censors, since rivals are also hawking similar clickbait as they play catch up.

显然今日头条不是唯一一个被批“三观” 不正 的新闻应用，它的竞争对手在追赶过程中也做了“标题党”。

afoul ：[ə'faʊl] to experience problems, punishment or harm because you do not obey a rule or disagree with a powerful organization, group or person 与…相冲突；与…抵触

“We won’t survive if we don’t follow Toutiao’s example,” says a senior executive at one news portal.

一家新闻门户的高管说：“如果不效仿今日头条的话，我们就没法生存”。

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