Yandex Aims at Youtube With Own Video Service
Russian internet giant Yandex is launching a video streaming service aimed at rivaling Google’s YouTube.
The new sercie will will allow users to publish videos on its personal recommendation platform Yandex Zen. Yandex Zen selects content based on user preferences and will allow bloggers to publish up to 15-minute-long videos.
Yandex is following in the footsteps of China’s Toutiao, a core product of Beijing-based company ByteDance. Toutiao has a video channel where bloggers can upload content and an algorithm recommends it to users.
More than half of all Russians watch video content through Yandex’s search engine, but it’s still in third place after the largest video streaming website YouTube and the country’s biggest social network VKontakte, according to a recent survey by Deloitte.