Every day, in a former Beijing aeroplane factory that is now the headquarters of Jinri Toutiao, servers sort and tag some 200,000 articles and videos that the mobile app’s users will consume that day.
With nearly 600m users, five-year-old Toutiao has overtaken traditional and state-owned media to become a significant channel through which the world’s most populous country gets its news.
Meaning “Today’s Headlines”, Jinri Toutiao is also one of China’s most valuable tech start-ups, valued at $11bn after its latest Series D funding round led by Sequoia Capital last month. That is more than 20 times its $500m valuation in 2014, sparking a debate over the worth of what is essentially a news aggregation app.