What can the closure of the largest news aggregators in Russia lead to: comments by experts and market participants

    The proposal of the deputies to introduce a special legal regime for “news aggregators” (Internet resources that collect, process and disseminate information) was critically accepted. The bill obliges news aggregators to "verify the reliability of publicly relevant information disseminated." For the publication of false information, an extrajudicial “adoption of measures to suppress the dissemination of false information” is provided for by a complaint of the authorized bodies.

    The share of foreign capital in the service should not exceed 20%. For refusing to delete inaccurate information at the request of Roskomnadzor, the news aggregator will be required to pay a fine of up to 5 million rubles (for legal entities). The fact that such a project was submitted to the State Duma for consideration became known yesterday, February 25.

    Experts believe that the bill threatens the work of news services. Among them are Yandex.News , Google News , Rambler.News and other news aggregators. Because of this, publications can lose an average of 25% of the traffic.

    “If the bill intends to assign mass media responsibilities to news aggregators, the Yandex.News service will not be able to exist in its current form, ” Yandex representative Asya Melkumova told Kommersant yesterday. According to her, Yandex.News daily provides 6.5 million views to media sites. Media representatives interviewed by Vedomosti admitted that most of the traffic is received from this aggregator.

    Google News is a fully automated service that, like Yandex.News, works without any editorial involvement. “The list of news is formed solely by algorithms that take into account the aggregate interest of the media in a particular topic. The aggregator provides only links to news, transferring readers to the pages of relevant resources, ”said a company representative.

    Last year, conversions from Yandex.News provided about 25% of visitors to Kommersant's projects, about 5-7% came from Google News and 2-3% from Mail.ru news, said Vladimir Kommersant , Chairman of the Board of Directors Zhelonkin.

    Sites of Komsomolskaya Pravda editionsAccording to CEO Vladimir Sungorkin, they receive about 20-25% of traffic from aggregators: approximately 15-20% of traffic comes from Yandex.News, 3-5% from Google News, and KP does not cooperate with other aggregators.

    The site Vedomosti.ru receives about the same traffic from aggregators. “You can’t say that when the aggregators are closed, the traffic will drop sharply and will not recover - the user will find another way. Another thing is that aggregators are a convenient entry point for readers, and we would not want to lose it, ”said the site’s editor-in-chief.

    The state agency MIA "Russia Today" the share of news aggregators in January amounted to approximately 50% of the total traffic, the agency said. Maxim and Elle

    Magazine SitesOnly about 1% of the traffic is received from news aggregators, says Danil Khasanshin, Digital Project Director at MAXIM / ELLE: “We do not write and rewrite actual news, so we have a small share of news traffic. We sometimes fall into aggregators, for example with exclusive trailers, and then collect 20,000-30,000 transitions. "

    "The share of traffic ," Lenta.ru " from" Yandeks.Novosti "is about 10% of total traffic, the share of Mail.ru is negligible, and Google's share in the volume of incoming traffic to our resources more than on" Yandeks.Novosti ", says a representative of Rambler & Co Sofya Ivanova.

    On news aggregators on the Rain websiteabout 25-30% of traffic falls, of which the vast majority are from Yandex.News. “If the aggregators are turned off, we will inevitably and significantly decrease both in views and unique visitors,” the representative of the channel noted.

    For the current project, the main question is what is “checking the reliability of publicly relevant information disseminated,” says Pavel Vlasov-Mrdulyash, general manager of the media news aggregator

    “In general, if lawmakers believe that it is necessary to regulate this segment of the media market, then it is quite possible to find an intelligible way to do this correctly - but for this, I think, it is necessary to attract the relevant ministry and representatives of leading projects in this niche,” Vlasov-Mrdulyash believes.

    Alexey Ametov, founder of Look At Me :
    We have a small share of traffic from news aggregates, as our news is mainly lifestyle, and not news of politics or economics. To this bill, however, I have a very negative attitude. It worsens the situation with the media in Russia even more and negatively affects the development of the industry. If this law is adopted in its current form, it will be a very serious blow to the media industry and to Internet companies in Russia.

    Ilya Krasilshchik, publisher of Medusa :
    The share of traffic from aggregators is negligible, but we are not an indicator - we are foreign media, Yandex has been driving foreign media into a special pen for a long time, which almost no one sees. Traffic from Google is larger, but still the numbers are usually not serious. Mail.ru also has practically no effect on traffic. We do not work with other aggregators. But again, this is not an indicator - traffic from Yandex.News is critically important for media registered in Russia.

    As for the bill, this is another clumsy document that was invented by people who do not understand anything in the subject, but want to adjust something else - because they do not know how to do anything else. The Internet developed in Russia without the participation of the state - and this is the main reason why everything was fine with it before the intervention of the state. Now industry is being destroyed - simply by stupidity. Well good luck with that.

    Konstantin Panfilov, editor-in-chief of VC.ru :
    News aggregators [we] have almost nothing. There are explosions when the news falls into the top of Yandex or Mediametrix, but the effect, of course, is unstable.

    The consequences of the adoption of the bill, I do not assess in any way - it has not yet been adopted, there are no consequences. In its current form, the restrictions described there are not viable; the same Yandex in its statement described it well.

    Nikolay Kononov, the editor-in-chief of the Secret Company publication, told Megamind that news aggregators account for a small fraction of the site’s traffic. “The most terrible consequence may be this: the largest aggregators (like Yandex.News) are closed, and readers lose the habit of comparing a look at the same news from different sources, critically evaluating the information,” he noted. Roem

    Publisher , Yuri Synodov:
    The share of Roem.ru traffic coming from news aggregators is the market average, about 10%. The share of all market participants can be calculated from these reports: www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/media/index.html?slice=n_y;period=month - Yandex gives the most traffic, four times less than Mail.ru.

    If the bill is adopted in its current form, I think that aggregators, first of all, Yandex, will build their news in the issuance, and will not make a separate service based on the data they have.
    But I think that in the current form the bill has no chance of being adopted, it looks too crude. How much it will be “prepared” in the process of moving around the State Duma (and whether it will be “prepared” at all) is a question for GR employees of Internet companies.

    Nikita Likhachev, chief editor of TJournal.ru :
    I looked at the Yandex.Metrica statistics for TJ for the last quarter, where the share of clicks from sites is 4.9%, and Yandex.News in them is only 0.55% of the traffic. It is very rare that traffic from there is serious: Yandex.News is much more fond of news from government agencies and older news sites, it works opaque, and sometimes errors occur. All other aggregators have a lower percentage.

    Personally, I do not think that the bill will be adopted in its current form, or at least it will work as it is written in the document. A news aggregator with 6.5 million materials per day cannot be forced to check all the information, and if you close it, a gigantic part of the traffic will be lost by the state media.

    A more realistic outcome of this initiative (it has been going on since 2014, then it was not accepted) is vesting Roskomnadzor with the right to process complaints about the dissemination of false information and require aggregators to remove links to such materials. This works the same as the law on the “right to oblivion”, but it concerns not search engines, but aggregators. The prospect is this: officials refute the news - it is removed from the aggregators. The problem is that the opposition media, as far as I know, are already slightly pumped up with traffic from news aggregators, and there is nothing to worry about. For this, social networks are usually used - and they also fall under the current bill.

    Words by Dmitry Navoshi, director and co-owner of Sports.ru :
    We and on the web the share of visits from news aggregators is not too high, less than 15%. And most sessions are already performed by users of our applications www.sports.ru/docs/apps where aggregators have nothing to do with it. That is, it would seem that there is no direct harm to us personally.

    But the bill is obviously idiotic, which is already such a bill. It is aimed at further restricting the free access to information of the inhabitants of Russia - the state wants on the Internet to have something as close as possible to the monopoly established by it on television. He is also aimed at squeezing out independent players from the Russian market - and do not care that some of them, like Yandex, are quite proud of the country.

    Implications for the Russian Internet? I think that only those that we have seen in recent years of prohibitions and legislative insanity will only increase. Projects related to Russia will continue to lose capitalization and people. These people and money will simply flow to the development of some more sane markets.

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