“Zen News” began to limit the delivery of off-site traffic

Some of the links to news that the aggregator uses now lead not to websites, but to monetized channels of the same publications in Zen. For example, this replacement can be seen in TASS, News.ru, RT and others.

• Until September 2022, “Zen News” was called “Yandex News” and worked as a news aggregator, allowing more than 7 thousand partners to receive traffic from the page of the popular Russian search engine yandex.ru. In September 2022, Yandex sold the project to the VK holding. After the transaction, the service changed its name, but is still available on Yandex.ru with redirection to dzen.ru.

The innovation is already being actively discussed on specialized public pages of media professionals. Over the years of operation of the news aggregator, a pool of Internet media has formed around the traffic coming from it, including those that exclusively rewrite news from large information providers. Its representatives fear that traffic will eventually be blocked on “Zen” and the sites will receive nothing.

Sufficient traffic volume helps media outlets win government contracts with regional authorities, one of the market participants told RB.RU. If traffic is transferred only to Zen channels, a significant portion of posts will remain with minimal views. In the traffic structure of many media outlets, aggregator visitors occupy up to 80%.

The press service of “Zen” RB.RU reported that they are testing a new approach to news at the request of “federal publications.” The service did not reveal who exactly requested this.

“At the request of federal publications, Zen is conducting tests on Novosti to improve the quality of content delivery. In the early stages of testing, we see that the depth of news display has tripled and the coverage of media publications in Zen is growing,” the company’s press service explained to RB.RU.

According to the representative of the press service, Zen periodically conducts food experiments in Novosti. Time will tell if the experiment will become a real practice.

“We always analyze feedback from users and media partners to make the service even more convenient. The current experiment is no exception. We will examine the results together with media partners and then make a decision,” they said in the press service.

• The experiment is carried out in a context of declining monthly audience for the service. In November, the average daily reach of the Zen audience was 28.1 million people (ages 12 and up), and a year ago the figure was 30.6 million, according to Cross Web research from Mediascope (Russia 0 +). As of August 2024, viewership reached 28.96 million and was steadily declining.

Independent public relations consultant Denis Goldman believes that Zen News’ experiment with replacing site links with its own channels on Zen may indicate the platform’s desire to increase its influence in the distribution of information flows.

“If links to original resources are replaced by internal links, this will not only limit the audience’s access to primary sources, but will also create additional dependence on the Zen ecosystem media,” the specialist added.

According to him, this approach calls into question Zen’s role as an information intermediary.

“Instead of transparent operation, the platform becomes a kind of monopoly that controls incoming and outgoing traffic. This is especially important given that Zen, unlike media sites, independently determines the algorithms for displaying content,” added Denis Goldman.