Yandex.Zen has agreed to embed its recommendation feed into the second most popular Viber messenger in Russia. The latter, due to the partnership, hopes to increase the time that users spend in the application, now in this it is inferior to WhatsApp and Telegram. Yandex.Zen hopes to attract at least 10% of Russian messenger users, whose total number reaches 36 million per month.

Yandex.Zen has entered into an agreement with Viber (owned by the Japanese Rakuten), according to which the service’s recommendation feed will be built into the messenger. The Yandex.Zena feed will appear for Viber users in Russia in the Interesting tab, as well as in Belarus as a button on the main screen. Advertising blocks in the feed and publications will also be displayed via Viber, Yandex.Zen said, the parties do not comment on the division of advertising revenues.

Viber expects to increase user engagement through partnerships.
The messenger started testing Yandex.Zen back in August 2019. The pilot launch showed that, on average, each user spent about 12 minutes in the Zen feed in the messenger, according to Yandex. Yandex.Zen itself hopes to grow its audience, hoping that more than 10% of Viber users will start using the service every day.

The results of cooperation between Viber and Yandex.Zen will depend on how the materials are promoted. “We need new promotion tools that Viber doesn’t have yet. It is not clear how to train users to enter this tab if they have not done so before, ”he says. At the same time, the expert adds, a significant part of the Yandex.Zena audience are people over 45, which corresponds to the Viber audience.

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