Bytedance employee quits to start app that pays you to read the news

Ever dreamt of being paid to scroll through news? US-based BuzzBreak is making that come true by rewarding reading behavior with money, paying out around US$0.10 per article. The company says that its most voracious users have cashed out over US$1,000 in a month – it would’ve taken them at least 10,000 unique article clicks to arrive at that amount.

Paying users to consume news may seem like a novelty, but it’s common practice in China. Qutoutiao, the news app of Tencent, is a good example of this. “For readers, it is always too hard to resist free cash, especially those with time to kill,” says tech investor Chenhao Zhang, who leads Prometheus Fund.

Here’s how BuzzBreak works. It aggregates the news by displaying each article’s headlines and first few sentences to pique users’ interest and make them click on the story. That way, traffic gets redirected to the original news websites and readers get rewarded in points, which they can then cash out.

BuzzBreak compiles news and rewards users with cash for reading. / Photo credit: BuzzBreak

BuzzBreak makes money purely through partnering with third-party advertising platforms, which pay it to display ads every three to four articles. The startup says it doesn’t charge news providers a single cent.

“We increase their traffic at no cost. That’s because we want more of them to join us, as good content calls for a variety of news sources,” says BuzzBreak co-founder Aron Lyu. “And users stay because of good content.”

What’s interesting is that Lyu is a former product manager at Bytedance’s news aggregator TopBuzz.

All of the mistakes that were made in TopBuzz, I’ll try to avoid in BuzzBreak.

After leaving TopBuzz in May 2018, he joined a company called Partiko to help its CEO Sida Wang and chief technology officer Mike Ma develop a blockchain-based app designed to encourage users to create more content. Partiko started off by rewarding content creators with cryptocurrency. But as Lyu realized that cryptocurrency wasn’t as widely adopted as he hoped, the three of them decided to pivot to giving out money, leading to BuzzBreak.

“All of the mistakes that were made in TopBuzz, I will try to avoid in BuzzBreak… that’s why we’re focusing on localization efforts to fit individual countries’ needs,” says Lyu. To elaborate, he says that his startup allows users to cash out their earnings using e-wallet services.

The BuzzBreak team: (from left) CTO Mike Ma, co-founder and chief product officer Aron Lyu, CEO Sida Wang. / Photo credit: BuzzBreak

“TopBuzz was [initially] only offering PayPal as a cash-out option for users, which wasn’t optimal as it had a very low penetration rate in Indonesia and Thailand,” Lyu says. TopBuzz now offers payments through bank transfers as well, though it still highly recommends PayPal due to “technical issues.” Tech in Asia reached out to Bytedance, but it declined to comment on this story.

The differences between TopBuzz and BuzzBreak also extend to their operating models. TopBuzz rewards users for creating content, rather than reading content like BuzzBreak does. TopBuzz also pays US$0.001 per click, a hundredth of what readers would get per click from BuzzBreak. TopBuzz users also have to fulfill more criteria to be awarded the credit, such as ad delivery, the appropriateness of content, and the amount of clicks received over time. These factors make their climb towards getting a full dollar much steeper.

Pivoting to popularity

Already profitable