Five years ago, Yandex Zen began as a news feed on within the Yandex mobile browser and has evolved to become one of the largest content platforms in Russia, used by millions of people daily consuming and publishing content.
From 2015 to 2017, only articles from popular (and verified) media outlets could be read on Zen, but since then it’s been a fully-fledged “blogging” platform open to anyone willing to put in the effort and grow a channel from nothing.
Recently, the Zen team also announced a writer’s support program for new channels, named Aurora, as well as introducing new features for Zen authors, such as the ability to include links in Zen videos, and the ability to embed forms.
Yandex Zen, by the numbers
Every day, more than 16-million users access the Zen platform, spending on average 49 minutes consuming content.
More than 40,000 articles are published daily from a pool of 30,000 active authors, 1,300 of which are a part of the Nirvana program.
Videos published on Zen collect around 1.7-billion views per week.
Around 930 companies and brands have developed their own channels.
Optimizing For Zen
For me, having an optimized Zen channel and publishing regularly is an important part of getting your brand establishing within the Russian market, coupled with strategies for other relevant products, and of course, Yandex.Search.
As a recommended reading piece, we put together this top-level guide on getting started with the Zen platform.
