After the launch of a program called We-Media Reward Plan 2.0 in mid-March 2017, UCWeb Inc. announced the achievement of the UC News application up to April 2017 to reach 100 million monthly active users in Indonesia and India.
UC News is a strategic product of UCWeb which is now owned by Alibaba for content distribution. First launched in August 2016, UC News has posted a new achievement by becoming the one app with the fastest growth in Indonesia with more than 20 million monthly active users in 7 months.
Donald Ru, General Manager of UCWeb Indonesia, Alibaba Mobile Business Group describes began last February, more than 1,300 million of readers of the article up to the month of April. That now has 45 million article readers every day in Indonesia. While in India a total of 95 million readers daily active. “We see significant growth in the average time spent by the user UC News, which currently reaches more than 20 minutes per person. The digitization of this content really change the shape of the information acquisition daily in the era of ‘fragmented reading’ this,” said the Donald in a press release we received.
The anticipation of Low-Quality Content, Including Hoaxes in UC News
According to Donald, the quality of the content is an essential part of the reader, but he admitted still see the low-quality content, as news of the hoax, pirated, duplication, and content that violates the norm which reduces the quality of the reading.
In the past, to filter the content for the reader requires a lot of human labor. However, it is not possible to process up to 250,000 articles every day that is in the UC News. “That’s where the technology Big Data & AI are present to ensure a quality reading experience and also work closely with our partners to regulate and prevent the arrival of low-quality content and also perform the protection against quality content,” added Donald.
This technology is claimed to be able to read the customer behavior, their passions, the speed of the Wi-Fi connection and other elements associated with the ability of the reader to access the data, allowing every reader to get content tailored for them. AI technologies can also predict the topics that will be often discussed in a future time and is the secret of UCWeb to always be smart and follow the trend.
Party UC Web is also working to build a content distribution platform that allows content quality, including the content of PGC (Professionally Generated Content) and UGC content (User Generated Content), to reach more users. “Content consumption PGC and UGC will really develop together when the method of distribution of big-data on the content applied, which will also open the doors to the provider of the content is quality, whether of the corporation or individual,” said Donald.