Yandex sells its news aggregator and Zen platform to VK, and buys the food delivery service Delivery Club from VK. The main page of "Yandex" will now be ya.ru. It is reported by RBC.
The Yandex news aggregator will now be placed on the page of the Zen platform. Couriers cooperating with Delivery Club will have access to the Yandex platform, but the Delivery Club brand will remain.
The transaction is scheduled to close by the end of 2022.
The day before, the former head of Yandex.News Lev Gershenzon announced the launch of The True Story, an independent news aggregator. “Our task is to show the main events of the day and for each event to give brief information and provide links to various media materials that write in detail about the event,” he explained .
The True Story service will have English and Russian versions, Gershenzon said in an interview with Roskomsvoboda. The English version will include 150 sources from 15 countries. The Russian language will be mainly independent media. “Our goal in Russia is to help oppressed publications. But in order to avoid imbalance, the selection includes several official publications: Interfax, RBC, Kommersant, Vedomosti, RTVI. So far, it seems that there are enough of them to present the official mainstream agenda and, in general, the news picture is balanced,” he said.
According to the businessman, The True Story team is still working on a volunteer basis. “But there is one grant, plus several funds are interested in the project. <…> I hope that after the launch and receiving feedback, the coverage will be greater and then we will again turn to investors and companies. Of course, the project will not be able to live long in the mode of pure volunteering,” he said.
Gershenzon headed the Yandex.News project from 2005 to 2012. After the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he urged Yandex to stop hiding information about the war and advised the company's employees to quit if they could not influence what was happening.