- Yandex (YNDX -0.7%) is launching a user-driven video service it hopes will rival YouTube in Russia.
- That comes through its Yandex Zen recommendation platform, which will allow bloggers to publish up to 15-minute-long videos.
- And the approach is similar to ByteDance's Toutiao, where bloggers upload content and an algorithm recommends it to users.
- Testing of the new service has taken off, Reuters notes, with Yandex Zen hitting 20M video views a day with a daily audience of 11M users. But Yandex is still in third place in Russian video views behind YouTube (GOOG -0.7%, GOOGL -0.7%) and social network VKontakte.