Internet plays important role in future: CEO Li Ya

The internet industry will play a very important role in the process of China's further reform and opening-up, as well as facing new challenges, said Li Ya, CEO of mobile news aggregator Yidianzixun on Wednesday in Wuzhen, East China's Zhejing province.

"China has witnessed magnificent changes since the government introduced the reform and opening-up policy 40 years ago. The internet, with its nature of openness and connection, has accompanied the development," Li said in an exclusive interview with China Daily website at the fifth World Internet Conference, which was held Nov 6-9.

Li stressed that improvements in people's living standards, people's cognizance of information and ideas, and China's global image and status are very representative achievements made in the past 40 years.

"If the country can accelerate the reform pace of its capital market, the Chinese economy and the internet industry will embrace more world-famous achievements," he said.

On one hand, a more open and healthy capital market will help people share the fruits of reform and opening-up, Li said.

On the other hand, China is transforming its economic development model, no longer depending on resources and exports. "That requires more independent innovations, then the role of the public trading market is critical," Li said.

As a mobile news app with more than 65 million daily active users , Yidianzixun has tried hard to use technological innovations to realize the idea of human-machine synergy and help users get more valuable content.

"People have a natural preference to seek novelty, gossip and emotional things and these things are easier to get clicks and spread. That is to say, when big data and artificial intelligence technologies are applied, it is easier to dig up such content," said Li.

Subsequently, the algorithm-based content distribution method generated widespread novelty, entertainment, gossip, vulgarity and even fake news.

The traffic-driven business model is another reason for the massive spread of meaningless information, because traffic is key to advertisement revenue and fundraising to many internet news platforms.

Yidianzixun positions itself as a media platform, claiming to be based on a combination of machine recommendations and people's active expression of their interests.

"Making use of our technological innovations, we effectively combine the search engine and interest engine to encourage people to express their interests and then create a more comprehensive and profound user portrait," Li said.

The method can surpass the algorithm-based process and make recommendations in accordance with your historical browsing behaviors.

"We always think we should focus on users and provide long-term value to them, not following competitors in short-term behaviors," Li added.

"I believe in the future. When users become more conscious, the industry becomes more self-disciplined. When more effective government supervision and technological innovations are in place, then the internet information industry will become based more on user value and social value, not just the advertising value of the enterprises," Li said.

The private mobile news app got a license for internet news information service last year and the license for video manufacturing in the first half of this year.

"We will work with partners from various vertical industries, such as health, fitness, child-raising, tourism, make-up and others to provide our users with useful and interesting content," Li said.

The annual internet conference offered a good platform for practitioners from home and abroad and regulatory institutions to discuss and focus on some important industrial topics, Li said.