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

The proposal of deputies to introduce a special legal regime for “news aggregators” (Internet resources that collect, process and disseminate information) was perceived critically. The bill obliges news aggregators to “verify the accuracy of the socially significant information disseminated”. For the publication of inaccurate information, an extrajudicial “taking measures to curb the dissemination of inaccurate information” on the complaint of authorized bodies is provided.



The share of foreign capital in the service should not exceed 20%. For failure to remove 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 was announced 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 on average 25% of traffic.

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“If the bill proposes to impose on media aggregators the responsibility of the media in full, the Yandex.News service cannot exist in its current form,” a representative of Yandex Asya Melkumova told Kommersant yesterday. According to her, Yandex.News provides media sites with 6.5 million views daily. Media representatives polled by Vedomosti recognized that most of the traffic was received from this aggregator.



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



Last year, transitions from Yandex.News provided about 25% of visitors with Kommersant projects, about 5-7% accounted for Google News and 2-3% for Mail.ru news, said the chairman of the board of directors of the Kommersant publishing house Vladimir Zhelonkin.



According to CEO Vladimir Sungorkin, the websites of Komsomolskaya Pravda publications receive about 20-25% of traffic from aggregators: about 15-20% of traffic comes from Yandex.News, 3-5% from Google News, and other KP aggregators does not cooperate.



The site Vedomosti.ru receives from the aggregators about the same amount of traffic. “We can not say that when closing aggregators traffic drops 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, ”the editor-in-chief of the site said.



The state agency MIA “Russia Today” has a share of news aggregators in January of about 50% of the total traffic, said a representative of the agency.



Maxim and Elle magazine websites only get about 1% of the traffic from news aggregators, says MAXIM / ELLE digital projects director Danil Hasanshin: “We don’t write and rewrite current news, so the share of news traffic is small. We sometimes get into aggregators, for example with exclusive trailers, and then collect 20,000–30,000 transitions. ”



“The share of “ Lenta.ru ” traffic from Yandex.News is about 10% of the total traffic, Mail.ru’s share is insignificant, and Google’s share in the volumes of incoming traffic to our resources is greater than from Yandex.News,” says the representative Rambler & Co Sophia Ivanova.



The news aggregators on the Dozhd website account for about 25-30% of the traffic, of which the vast majority comes from Yandex.News. “If the aggregators are turned off, we will inevitably and significantly slacken both on views and on unique visitors,” said the representative of the TV channel.



On the current project, the main question is what “to check the accuracy of the socially significant information disseminated,” says Pavel Vlasov-Mrdulyash, general director of the news media aggregator2.



“In general, if lawmakers believe that it is necessary to regulate this segment of the media market, then it is quite possible to find a sensible way to do it correctly - but for this, I believe, it is necessary to involve a specialized ministry and representatives of leading projects in this niche,” Vlasov-Mrdulyash said.



Alexey Ametov, Founder of Look At Me :

Our share of traffic from news aggregates is small, since our news is mainly lifestyle, not politics or economics. By this bill, however, I am very negative. 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 the Internet to companies in Russia.

Ilya Dyer, publisher of Medusa :

The share of traffic from aggregators is insignificant, but we are not an indicator - we are foreign media, Yandex has been driving foreign media for a long time to a special pen that almost no one sees. The traffic from Google is more, but still the numbers are usually not serious. Mail.ru also has virtually no effect on traffic. We do not work with other aggregators. But again, this is not an indicator - for media registered in Russia, traffic from Yandex.News is of critical importance.



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

Konstantin Panfilov, chief editor of VC.ru :

On news aggregators [we] have almost nothing. There are explosions when the news falls into the top of “Yandex” or the Mediametrix, but the effect, of course, is not constant.



I do not assess the consequences of the adoption of the bill in any way - they have not yet accepted it, there are no consequences. In the current form, the limitations described there are not viable, the same Yandex described it well in its statement .

Nikolai Kononov, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Sekret Firmy, told Megamozhga that news aggregators account for a small share of the site’s traffic. “The worst result can be this: the largest aggregators (like Yandex.News) are closing down, and readers are losing the habit of matching the look at the same news from different sources, critically evaluating information,” he noted.



Publisher Roem , Yuri Synods:

The share of Roem.ru traffic coming from news aggregators is average for the market, 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 distributes the most traffic, four times less than Mail.ru.



If the bill is adopted in its current form, I think that the aggregators, primarily Yandex, will embed their news in the issue, and will not do a separate service based on the data they have.

But I think that in its current form, the bill has no chance of being adopted, it looks too raw. How much will he be “dogged” in the process of movement in the State Duma (and whether they will be “prepared at all”) is a question for GR-employees of Internet companies.

Nikita Likhachev, editor-in-chief of TJournal.ru :

I looked at Yandex.Metrics statistics for TJ for the last quarter, where the share of referrals from sites equals 4.9%, and Yandex.News in them is only 0.55% of traffic. It rarely happens that the traffic from there is serious: Yandex.News loves news from government agencies and older news sites much more, works opaquely and sometimes makes mistakes. 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 written in the document. A news aggregator with 6.5 million materials a day cannot be forced to check all the information, and if you close it, the state media themselves will lose a huge part of the traffic.



A more realistic outcome of this initiative (it has been dragging on since 2014, then it was not accepted) - giving Roskomnadzor the right to handle complaints about the dissemination of false information and to require aggregators to delete references to such materials. It works in the same way as the law on the “right to oblivion”, only concerns not search engines, but aggregators. The prospect is as follows: officials refute the news - it is removed from the aggregators. The problem is that the opposition media, as far as I know, is so slightly pumped up by 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.

The words of Dmitry Navosha, director and co-owner of Sports.ru :

In our country and on the web, the share of visits from news aggregators is not too high, less than 15%. And most of the sessions are already committed 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 an account. It is aimed at further restricting the free access to information for residents of Russia - the state also wants on the Internet to have something as close as possible to the monopoly it has established on television. It is also aimed at squeezing independent players from the Russian market - and don't care that some of them, like Yandex, are quite the pride 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. Russia-related projects will continue to lose capitalization and people. These people and money will simply flow into the development of some more sane markets.