Zen (recommendation system)

Zen is an example of the implementation of a specialized artificial intelligence technology.[10][11][12]

To analyze the interests and preferences of users, Yandex used information about sites that have been visited, as well as user-specified interests.[13]

The system analyzes the user's favorite sites and other behaviors with the aim of creating a unique model of the user's preferences.[14] With an increasing amount of data about the user, the system can offer the user more relevant and topical content,[14] including content from sources unfamiliar to the user.[15] Zen adapts to the changing interests of the user.[16] For example, if a user begins to read about architecture, content on this subject will appear in their content feed more often.[17][18]

Prediction of user interest by using collaborative filtering[9]

Zen belong to the “Discovery” technology category (services and apps that use artificial intelligence to adapt to a user).[19][20][21]

The technology that underlies Zen was adapted by Yandex and CERN for use in the Large Hadron Collider. It is used to provide in-depth analysis of the results of physics experiments taking place at the LHС.[22][23]

In 2017, Yandex announced the launch of a platform that allows companies and independent authors to publish media content (articles, photos, videos) directly to Zen.[24] The platform also allows popular authors to earn money by using micropayment channels and ads.[24][25][26]

In August 2021, the "Videos" section was launched in Zen. It contains videos up to 1 minute long created by Zen bloggers.[27]

In 2021, the company paid out over 2 billion rubles to authors of publications.[28]

Prior to the launch of the platform, Zen feeds consisted only of publications selected from publicly available sources.[29]

After buying Zen, VK began to implement changes. In January 2023, the limit on uploaded videos was increased from 10 GB to 30 GB.[30] In February 2023, users got an opportunity to withdraw money through the VK Pay service.[31]

In 1997, Yandex began research into natural language processing, machine learning and recommendation systems.[32] In 2009, the proprietary machine learning algorithm MatrixNet was developed by Yandex, becoming one of the key components that Zen functions on.[9] The first Yandex service to introduce the use of recommendation technology was Yandex.Music, which was launched in September 2014.[33] This technology was then implemented in Yandex.Market and Yandex.Radio.[33]

In June 2015, a beta version of Zen became available.[33][34][35] At first, the Zen content feed showed only content from the media, and the service was only available to the 5% of users of Yandex Browser on Android that had registered a Yandex account.[33] Prior to this, Zen was available in an experimental form on the webpage zen.yandex.ru.[9][36]

In the following months, other types of content were added to Zen, such as image galleries, articles, blogs, forums, videos from YouTube, etc.[37][9][38]

In 2017, Zen launched Narratives, a special content format for mobile devices. Narrative is a set of slides with texts, photos, videos and GIFs. In January 2018, the format became available to Zen authors.[39]

In August 2022, VK announced the purchase of Zen and Zen News. The deal was closed on September 12, 2022.[40]

The head of the Zen service is Anton Frolov.[41]

The platform has ad-based business model. In September 2017, Zen's revenue amounted to 200 million rubles.[42] In 2020, the planned revenue amounted to 13.1 billion rubles. According to the results of the fourth quarter of 2021, the planned revenue amounted to 18.9 billion rubles.[43]

After the release of Zen, several major companies also announced personal recommendation services. In May 2016, Mail.Ru Group presented a similar project called Likemore, which offers users content from VK (VKontakte) social media groups.[44][45] In August 2016, Google launched a test version of a similar service Google Discover that recommends news articles.[44][46][47] Apple and Facebook have also launched news services with similar functionality.[48] In 2019, VK launched a similar service named "Pulse". It is assumed that VK will merge Pulse and purchased Zen.[49][50]