By SHE Xiaochen
Qutoutiao Inc. announced on Monday that the company received a delisting determination letter from Nasdaq on March 14, and had decided not to appeal. Qutoutiao shares will be suspended from Thursday. The company will be delisted by July 3.
The mobile content aggregator was founded in 2016, and in just two years, Qutoutiao had gone public on Nasdaq. On its debut day, Qutoutiao closed 128 percent higher at US$15.97, pushing the market value of the company to US$4.7 billion (32 billion yuan).
But in the years followed, Qutoutiao proved unable to compete in a mercurial market and failed to find a way to profit. In 2021 alone, the company lost 1.2 billion yuan.
Qutoutiao owed its rise to basically paying users to read the content. Members of the platform won points for each article they read and each link they clicked. These points could eventually be traded for merchandise, or converted into cash. Qutoutiao also paid users to invite new users to download the app.
The problem was that while people were happy to earn some pocket money by reading some interesting content, they weren’t prepared to read any old thing.
Qutoutiao announced that it planned to close its content creation platform in April last year. At that time, observers were more shocked to discover that Qutoutiao still had a content department than by the news of its demise. At that time the company was estimated to be worth a mere US$41 million.
Qutoutiao gave up on the most important quality of a content platform: quality itself.
When other platforms, like Douyin, Kuaishou and Bilibili were lavishing cash on influencers and content creators, Qutoutiao was busy sending users text messages to remind them to “open the red envelope.”
Eventually, Qutoutiao became a collation of garbage, if not outright illegal pornography that no one ever read. By press time, the share price in Qutoutiao is US$0.72.
