Yandex has entered an agreement with the messaging service, Viber, to embed Zen feed recommendations with the application home screen.
The agreement comes after a year-long pilot testing period.
Last summer, we started testing Zen integration into the messenger, and the experiment was successful. Therefore, from today on, the ribbon will appear for all messenger users in Russia in the “Interesting” tab and in Belarus as the main button on the main screen.
The partnership benefits both parties, in that Zen aims to attract 10% of the Russian messenger audience to the platform (which is estimated to be around 36-million MAU), and Viber gets to increase user engagement and time spent within the application.
Results from the pilot seem to support this, with users spending 12 minutes viewing Zen feed within the Viber application, across a sample of 1-million Viber users within Russia.
The announcement comes off the back of Viber announcing they will sell advertising on the platform in the Russian market, with assumed relationships with the likes of YouTube, Yandex, and Rambler Group.
Translation
ленте Дзен is Zen Tape, which is a recommended “feed” of content. You may see this referred to in translations as Zen Tape, but calling it a feed makes more sense.
