TouTiao is a literal translation of Headline.

（头）Tou = Head; （条）Tiao = Line

条 is a measure word for things that are long (rivers / snakes / pants), but it's not the word for line. The character most closely related to the concept is 线 xian, and 线 is indeed the word for "line" in many senses. In other senses, you find words of more than one syllable.

Yes, it's not very accurate in term of word-by-word translation. Maybe it's for suiting the context and habits.

A strip (条) of news is works better than A line (线) of news in Chinese.

Sure, the landscape for aggregators is more fractured though, due to the long duration of establishment of huge news sources in the English markets (ie the English market is very consolidated at the top).

Eg: Hacker News, Google News, Business Insider, Buzzfeed, Reddit, Huffington Post, Drudgereport, Digg, Flipboard, Techmeme, Redef and about 57 others. Some of them mix original content with blatantly regurgitated content, some are pure play aggregation. They're all playing in or right around the Toutiao neighborhood.

The established players, and how well known they are, makes it far more difficult to build super valuable aggregators. If you want business news, you likely already know about Bloomberg, CNBC, etc. and they're going to cover most stories that matter.

Prismatic was similar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prismatic_(app)

Wavii. They did news aggregation and produced summaries with links back to the most popular article on the subject. They were bought by Google in 2013. https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/googl...