Baijiahao – Emerging Content Creation Platform Released by Baidu

Self-media has completely infused people’s daily life and become a force could not be underestimated in the modern society. With the support of search engine and big data technology, Baijiahao, leverages the super traffic platform of Baidu and uses to provide personalized news and information recommendations based on users’ interests and reading habits. According to the business data officially announced by Baidu on May 17, as of March 2019, the total user hours of Baidu App and short video increased 83% year-on-year. Bajiahao content creators reached 2.1 million, and the daily active users grew 768% year-on-year, ‘including People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency and CCTV and several provincial media resources stationed.

What Is Baijiahao

Bajiahao was officially launched and tested in June 2016, and officially opened to the public on September 28. In less than 4 months, Bajiahao completed the process of building the account system, perfecting the distribution strategy and constructing a complete advertising system, etc. By the end of 2016, Bajia had begun to show its scale. Since then it has continued to make efforts, and when many self media platforms began to grow sluggishly, the Bajia number advanced at a high speed.

As of April 30, 2017, Bajiahao has more than 560,000 registered authors, 430,000 authors have earned money through writing on Bajiahao, and the platform has reached 86 million daily users. As a platform to provide content creators with profit and influence, Bajiahao has been regarding “influence the world here” as its original intention and mission since its founding. As the scale of users continues to grow and the demand of the platform expands, Bajiahao launched the author index and author hierarchy, and then launched the content e-commerce, reward and other functions, APP diversion, advertising profit sharing and other multiple ways in 2017 to further improve the product experience and operation system, accelerate the improvement of author services, and gradually embark on a high-speed development trajectory.

UGC is the main driver of Baijiahao’s growth

UGC (User Generated Content) refers to user-created text, images, audio, video and other content published on the Internet in any form, and is an emerging mode of creating and organizing online information resources. In the era of mobile Internet, as the subjectivity of the audience is highlighted, the right of the general public to speak is enhanced. In the meantime, the interactivity and openness of the platform is continuously enhanced, the relationship between the audience and information has completely changed. They no longer rely on traditional media to obtain information in the past, but can actually become the first source of information themselves. Everyone can become a producer in the era of universal journalism, and independently search for content that they are interested in or hot to create and publish, and influence others more.

Baijiahao has 1.9 million writers, and the content on the platform is mainly self-produced works by users, who rely on their own interests and abilities to continuously contribute after they are enrolled in Bajiahao. In addition to the core group of journalists, which consists of self-publishers who have transformed from traditional media such as professional portals and websites and newspapers, professional writers who have many years of writing experience and a lot of excellent works and some working , there are thousands of other creators.

A large creator base ensures complete coverage of the events and reporting perspectives of the whole platform. Each author has different networks and viewpoints, so they will produce different types of articles. For example, for the daily experience of the pendant category of sports, in addition to daily events, hot highlights, some celebrity gossip and pan-entertainment content are often more often provided by the creators in the first place.

Authority cooperation makes articles trustworthy

Baidu has always attached importance to cooperation with authoritative content institutions, and is the first to complete cooperation with top two Chinese national authoritative media. June 2017, Baidu and the People’s Daily reached a strategic cooperation; February 2018, it also hand in hand with Xinhua News Agency. The two sides will jointly launch “Xinhua News Agency Super Channel” and fully distribute the news and information content of Xinhua News Agency on Baidu platform, including current affairs, international, science and technology, sports, finance and economics, society and people’s livelihood, etc. Nearly 1,000 articles will be distributed and docked on Baidu platform daily.

At the same time, Bajiahao has also reached content copyright cooperation with CCTV, Xinjing News, Visual China, Surfing News, Wall Street Insight, Beijing Daily, Global Network and other first-line authoritative media; in terms of government affairs, Bajiahao has also reached in-depth cooperation with central government agencies such as the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Ecological Environment and the Ministry of Education.

In addition, Bajiahao is also continuing to strengthen in-depth cooperation and hotspot synergy with important provincial media, such as with Beijing Daily, Jiefang Daily, Zhejiang Newspaper Group, Xinhua Daily and other provincial head media. For local media, Bajiahao has also started to cooperate with local media in 2018 to explore deeply in content with local characteristics such as food, clothing, housing and transportation.

Some Insights

So far, Bajiahao has cooperated with more than 2,600 media accounts, achieving a 95% coverage rate of top authoritative organizations and a high quality content ratio of 79.90%. Through the cooperation with these authoritative media , a series of exclusive brand content has been created. When completing the cooperation with Xinhua News Agency, the person in charge of Bajiahao publicly said: the future of Bajiahao will continue to increase cooperation with authoritative media, improve their content ecological layout, and form a content matrix based on the standardized source media of the Internet Information Office.

In the content logic of Bajiahao, “standard” has always been the basis of the content ecology, self-media is in line with the background of the relevant norms, as a complement to enrich the content ecology. Because of this, Baidu can also be said to be the most emphasized authority and standardized content source among all comprehensive content platforms.