Andex Intends to Pay Mass Media for Content for Yandex.News

Yandex intends to share advertising revenues with partners whose materials are included in the Yandex.News digest. Andrey Styskin, the head of the Search, Advertising and Cloud Services business group of Yandex, spoke about this in an interview with RBC.

Styskin said:

Together with our partners, we are ready to create new formats for presenting information and share with them the income received by the Yandex.News service.

According to him, more than 3,000 partners are now submitting their content to the Yandex.News service.

According to sources in the media market, Yandex announced its intention to test a new format for displaying news – digests – in the spring of this year. Its essence lies in the fact that the search engine will create text from snippets of news from various media. It is assumed that the reader will not need to follow the link to the source, he will be able to learn the essence directly from the digest. To make publishers interested in this, the company intends to offer monetization.

Yandex.News did not disclose the amount of its revenue, the total revenue of Yandex from advertising in the first quarter (the latest available data) amounted to 35.9 billion rubles. What part of the aggregator’s proceeds the media will be able to claim has not yet been disclosed. However, Styskin noted that the amount of payments will be proportional to the number of hits in the digest.

In this case, a selection of excerpts for the digest will be generated automatically using an algorithm that analyzes all the news of the story and isolates the key points. A link to the source news will be placed next to each excerpt.

Market participants do not yet fully understand the model proposed by Yandex, and since publishers are primarily interested in traffic, and digests assume that a Yandex.News user will not go to the media site, this does not look very interesting for publishers.