Yandex Zen

Yandex Zen

Developer(s)	Yandex
Initial release	June 2015 (June 2015)[1][2]
Development status	Active
Available in	over 50[3] languages
Type	Recommendation system
License	Freeware
Website	zen.yandex.com

Yandex Zen (Russian: Я́ндекс.Дзен) is a personal recommendations service created by Yandex that uses machine learning technology.^[4][5][6][7]

Zen creates a feed of content that automatically adjusts to the interests of a user.^[8] The selection of content is based on the analysis of browsing history, user-specified preferences, location, time of day and other factors.^[9][10]

Zen has a weekly active user audience of more than 20 million.^[11]

Technology

Zen is an example of the implementation of a specialized artificial intelligence technology.^[12][13]

To analyze the interests and preferences of users, Yandex uses information about sites that have been visited, as well as user-specified interests.^[14]

The system analyzes the user’s favorite sites and other behaviors with the aim of creating a unique model of the user’s preferences.^[15] With an increasing amount of data about the user, the system can offer the user more relevant and topical content,^[16] including content from sources unfamiliar to the user.^[17] Zen adapts to the changing interests of the user.^[18] For example, if a user begins to read about architecture, content on this subject will appear in their content feed more often.^[19][20]

Prediction of user interest by using collaborative filtering^[21]

The service is available as part of the desktop and mobile versions of Yandex Browser^[22] and in Yandex Launcher.^[23][24]

Zen, Launcher and Browser belong to the “Discovery” technology category (services and apps that use artificial intelligence to adapt to a user).^[25][26][27]

The technology that underlies Zen was adapted by Yandex and CERN for use in the Large Hadron Collider. It is used to provide in-depth analysis of the results of physics experiments taking place at the LHС.^[28][29]

Media platform

In 2017, Yandex announced the launch of a platform that allows companies and independent authors to publish media content (articles, photos, videos) directly to Zen.^[30] The platform also allows popular authors to earn money by using micropayment channels and ads.^[31][32][33] According to Zen Media Director Daniel Trabun, the company plans to pay up to $ 1 million to the best authors of publications in 2017.^[34][35]

Prior to the launch of the platform, Zen feeds consisted only of publications selected from publicly available sources.^[36]

History

In 1997, Yandex began research into natural language processing, machine learning and recommendation systems.^[37] In 2009, the proprietary machine learning algorithm MatrixNet was developed by Yandex, becoming one of the key components that Zen functions on.^[38] The first Yandex service to introduce the use of recommendation technology was Yandex.Music, which was launched in September 2014.^[39] This technology was then implemented in Yandex.Market and Yandex.Radio.^[40]

In June 2015, a beta version of Zen became available.^[41][42][43] At first, the Zen content feed showed only content from the media, and the service was only available to the 5% of users of Yandex Browser on Android that had registered a Yandex account.^[44] Prior to this, Zen was available in an experimental form on the webpage zen.yandex.ru.^[45][46]

In the following months, other types of content were added to Zen, such as image galleries, articles, blogs, forums, videos from YouTube, etc.^[47][48][49]

According to data from April 2017, Zen is available in more than 50 languages in more than 100 countries, including the United States, India and Brazil.^[50][51][52]

Management

The head of the Zen service is Viktor Lamburt.^[53][54]

Finances

Zen is one of Yandex’s experimental business activities.^[55][56] According to data from 2015, this segment earned the company almost half a billion rubles in revenue.^[57] In Q2 2016, Zen and other experimental services brought in 153 million rubles in revenue to Yandex.^[58][59] Monetization of the service is due to ad blocks built into the news feeds (in Russia, ads are served by Yandex.Direct).^[60]

Competitors

After the release of Zen, several major companies also announced personal recommendation services. In May 2016, Mail.Ru Group presented a similar project called Likemore, which offers users content from VK (VKontakte) social media groups.^[61][62] In August 2016, Google launched a test version of a similar service that recommends news articles.^[63][64][65] Apple and Facebook have also launched news services with similar functionality.^[66]

References