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Beijing TimeIn the early morning of August 12, Chinese table tennis player Sun Yingsha took the stage at the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics as a representative of Asian athletes, and blew out the Olympic flame together with athletes representing other continents.

The night before, domestic audiences already knew that Sun Yingsha would attend the closing ceremony.

On the evening of August 11, Baidu APP's Olympic program "Champions Call" invited Sun Yingsha's head coach Qiu Yike to do a live broadcast, attracting more than 1.5 million people to watch the live broadcast. It was during this live broadcast that Qiu Yike revealed: "Sun Yingsha will have an interactive session at the closing ceremony, so I am here to accompany her." Subsequently, the related topic instantly ignited multiple platforms across the entire network.

A few hours later, everyone saw that Qiu Yikou's understatementThe "interactive session" was to blow out the Olympic flame. The ability to live stream Qiu Yike before the closing ceremony was due, on the one hand, to the Baidu APP operation team's ability to predict hot topics, and on the other hand, because Qiu Yike was already on the Baidu APP contract list.

Why did a retired athlete and current coach become BaiduWho are the key figures of the APP in the Olympic events? All of this starts with the content ecosystem construction path of Baidu APP in the past two years.

Who should the content be made for?‍‍‍

Every company that deals with content has a set of evaluation systems for content, which may be related to the timeliness, depth, production skills, and even picture clarity of the content. But the most critical one is whether it can match the content needs of the target users.

Users are one of the most core assets of all platforms, and have become the most important variable factor in shaping the platform's temperament.What kind of users does the platform have and what kind of content do users need? This ultimately fills the gap between the platform and theThe last piece of the puzzle in the “good content” evaluation system.

Understanding Baidu from the perspective of target usersWith the APP’s operational actions in the past two years, the direction and path of its content ecosystem optimization may become much clearer.

according toAccording to a survey report released by APP GROWING, the main group of users of Baidu APP are middle-aged users. In terms of age profile, 57.5% of users are over 31 years old, 11.1% of them are 41 years old and above, and users aged 24 and below account for about 16.9%.

Behind this user portrait is BaiduAPP has accumulated 14 years of users.The earliest batch of users jumped into the mobile Internet era with an app called Baidu Mobile.The APP has grown up together and entered middle age; with the continuous updating and reconstruction of the content ecology, more and more young users have developed the habit of "searching when there is something to do, and taking a look when there is nothing to do"; the launch and operation of Baidu's large-font version and free listening version have attracted a large number of elderly users through a series of aging-friendly designs.

Young users may have doubts.How did the APP come up with the idea of ​​asking Sun Yingsha’s coach to do a live broadcast and eventually dig up some “explosive news”?

rightFor those born in the 2000s, Qiu Yike may only be Sun Yingsha's coach, but for those born in the 1980s and 1990s, Qiu Yike and his old partner Chen Qi were also well-known table tennis players in the Beijing and London Olympic cycles, leaving a generation of watching memories. Asking him to do the live broadcast not only satisfies users' attention to Sun Yingsha, but also allows Baidu APP users to meet a familiar "old friend".

In fact, providing platform users with good content and locking in core users with content has always been Baidu'sAPP's content strategy. Especially in the past two years, more and more operational actions have begun to play a role, such as the "Singing Concert" live broadcast that has gradually formed an IP.

Check BaiduThe list of singers in several live concerts on the APP can give you a sense of the platform's orientation in creating content for target users. Jeff Chang has held online concerts on the Baidu APP for two consecutive years. In the 2023 Spring Concert and the 2024 Summer Concert, the Prince of Love Songs does not need to sing Internet hits. He only needs to quietly sing his old songs, because on the other side of the screen is a generation that grew up listening to "White Moonlight" and understood what love is like in "Love Like Tide".

The live show "Golden Songs of Movies and TV in Childhood" invited veteran singers such as Zhou Huimin and Wang Mingquan to sing "The Most Beloved" and "Love Across Thousand Mountains and Rivers".People born in the 1970s and 1980s can also reminisce about their youth when color TVs were still a scarce commodity in the era of mobile Internet.

BaiduFriends of APP, if you see this article, can you invite Zhou Chuanxiong to this year’s autumn concert?You see, the first line of "Twilight" is"Spend the whole summer", the second line of "Man Ocean" is "Outside the window, the wind blows and the yellow leaves fall". If that's not enough, there are also "Cool Memories", "Autumn Sea" and "Autumn Tricks", it's really easy to put together an autumn playlist.

Thanks to the old song lovers.

In the AI ​​era, what kind of content tools do users need?

Closely related to the needs of platform users is the user's ability to master content tools. As a platform, while providing content, it also needs to lower the threshold for using tools. In simple terms,“Know how to use it”, “Easy to use”, “Love to use it”.

As a mobile app with a monthly active user base of up toWith 676 million users, Baidu APP’s core usage of search + information flow has no barriers to entry for most users. However, in the new AI era, how to smoothly integrate AI tools into users’ daily use and let AI capabilities truly help ordinary users consume content rather than just become a gimmick is the real problem that Baidu APP needs to solve at the tool level.

At Baidu, the goal anchoring is unified from top to bottom.

Li Yanhong has called for"Don't focus on models, focus on applications," because technology itself is not the goal, the real value lies in how to solve practical problems.

At this year's World Artificial Intelligence ConferenceIn a conversation during WAIC, Robin Li further elaborated on his understanding of the "volume application" path. "(Big model applications) have a transformative effect on existing business formats that is earlier and more obvious than the subversion from 0 to 1. I even think it can create more value."

BaiduThe new function of the APP, “Pinch”, demonstrates what Robin Li calls the “transformative effect of the big model on existing business formats”."Pinch" is an AI function launched by Baidu not long ago. On the article page, users can simply pinch inward on the screen with two fingers to get the main content of the current page.

Users who are familiar with large models should find that, in terms of functionality,“Pinch” enables intelligent summarization and extraction of key points, using the basic capabilities of this generation of large language models.What is commendable is that BaiduBased on technological innovation, the APP takes into account the user experience of ordinary users and completes an interactive innovation.

A senior product manager commented after the experience:"The biggest highlight of this feature is that it packages AI capabilities into 'human language' that ordinary users can understand. If you tell users that this is a large model, how it can be used, and where to click to generate a summary, the threshold for users is very high. But they don't need to learn this background knowledge at all. They just need to know that they can see the summary by pinching and learn this interactive action."

OneAfter experiencing it, the 32-year-old user told Hedgehog Community that he also hopes to see the "expand" function in the future. "Look, I pinched my two fingers inwards and it summarized it for me. So if I spread my two fingers outwards in the future, can it help me expand a comment?"

As Robin Li said, technology itself is not the goal, what is important is to create actual value for users. And this actual value must not come from temporary novelty, but from long-term stable daily use.

From Robin Li’s many public speeches and BaiduJudging from the current application methods of APP, high technology + low threshold is its core method of using AI to empower the content ecosystem.

Olympic Carnival Beyond Copyright

In addition to daily content that targets user groups and convenient tools with high technology and low threshold, there is another important link in the platform content ecology, namely new topics and new hot spots. Daily content tests the stability of the content ecology, while new hot content tests its explosive power.

The Paris Olympics, which just ended this morning, was the most watched hot event in the past half month. Without the copyright for the live broadcast of the event, BaiduThe APP still brought a carnival of Olympic-related content to platform users.

The first is clear and convenient information services.

As a hot information consumption portal, the complete infrastructure brings"Convenience" is the biggest advantage of Baidu APP. During the Olympic Games, users only need to enter the three words "Olympic Games" in the search bar to directly enter the Olympic Games special page. The special page gathers various forms of content such as the Olympic medal table, schedule, related videos, Olympic information, etc.

The innovations mentioned aboveThe AI ​​function "Pinch" also played a great role in the operation of Olympic content. During the Olympics, users only need to "pinch" the screen on the Baidu APP homepage to see the Olympic medal table and the latest Olympic information.

existWith the support of AI technology, Baidu APP relies on a complete product infrastructure to provide users with an upgraded experience of immersive participation in the Olympics. Today, tracking hot spots of sports events on Baidu APP has become a habit for many users, with billions of people searching and browsing athlete information, schedule results and other event information every day.

In addition to basic information services, the operation team can also focus on tracking popular Olympic figures.More aspects of "doing work".

Paris Olympics MenIn the 100m freestyle final, Chinese swimmer Pan Zhanle broke the world record with a time of 46.40 seconds, which made his statement from ten years ago, "Just be faster than Sun Yang," come true. In an interview, Sun Yang responded, "He did it! Pan Zhanle's performance was outstanding, and I am proud of him."

In an instant, a wave of reminiscing about Sun Yang's sports career swept the Internet.

Although he is unable to participate in the Paris Olympics, Sun Yang is still participating in the promotion and dissemination of Olympic content in his own way, and cheering for his former teammates in China.On July 25, Sun Yang completed his first live broadcast after his comeback on the "Champion Calls" live broadcast planning column of Baidu APP. He choked up several times when recalling his previous training life. On July 30, Sun Yang once again dropped into Baidu's live broadcast room to cheer for the Chinese Olympic athletes who were competing in a distant place.

Whether it was his first live show or his second appearance, Sun Yang's appearance brought a lot of traffic and attention to the live broadcast room. At the same time, many fans began to notice——In recent years, Baidu APP has paid great attention to the layout in the sports field, and more and more sports stars have begun to cooperate with Baidu APP.

In other episodes of this year's "Champions Call", table tennis queen Deng Yaping, backstroke king Xu Jiayu, badmintonSports stars such as the "Fanchen Combination" (Chen Qingchen and Jia Yifan) have also joined the live broadcast and interacted deeply with users. It is understood that the above athletes have signed contracts with Baidu APP. In addition, the confident and outspoken sprinter Wu Yanni, Zhang Yufei who won countless fans at the Paris Olympics, synchronized swimming champions Xiao Yanning and Feng Yu, etc., have also signed contracts with Baidu APP.

Chasing champions is something that almost all platforms will do, but BaiduIn its operation this year, the APP also turned its attention to those who stood outside the halo.

On August 8, Wu Yanni ranked fourth in the group with a time of 12.98 seconds in the 110-meter hurdles at the Paris Olympics, and unfortunately missed the semifinals. When the athlete was facing defeat, Baidu APP shouted the slogan "Persistence and challenge, never give up" to Wu Yanni through official channels, standing gently and firmly behind the contracted athlete.

Baidu has alwaysAPPs all pay great attention to the investment in non-competition copyrights of athletes. In their public list of signed athletes, there are both old-generation athletes such as Deng Yaping and Qiu Yike, as well as new-generation athletes such as Wu Yanni, Zhang Yufei and Jia Yifan, which can fully meet the needs of different users for different sports content, and also meet the exclusive feelings of users of different age groups for competitive sports.

The two-week Olympics is more like a training exercise for Baidu's content operation capabilities.Behind the reports interpreted by AI is actually the iteration of Baidu APP's capabilities in IP reserves, technical optimization, new hot operations, etc. in the past year.

After identifying its core users, BaiduAPP is trying to reshape its content ecosystem to become better, newer and more convenient.

The 14-year-old Baidu APP is regaining the feeling of “simple and reliable”.