Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on April 3, 2025 in order to attend this event.

Please join the Harriman Institute for a Director’s Seminar with Andrey Simonov. Moderated by Valentina Izmirlieva.

This talk measures the ability of news aggregators to impact news consumption and upstream news production through the control of their algorithms. Andrey Simonov will focus on a case study of the largest news aggregator in Russia, Yandex News, from 2013 to 2018. Analyzing the universe of articles published by 50 major online news outlets, he detects and characterizes news events. He then combines this data with Yandex’s top-5 news citations to estimate Yandex’s news aggregation algorithm. Simonov documents that Yandex adjusted its algorithm in response to a 2016 Russian law which made aggregators liable for the content they cite. Specifically, Yandex significantly reduced the share of references to independent media – from 20% to 10% – while increasing references to government-controlled media. He then shows that Yandex’s citations have a significant impact on outlets’ traffic; a full slate of Yandex’s citations can boost an outlet’s traffic by almost 400 thousand daily visitors (between +23% and +1,000% for the outlets in this sample). The impact of Yandex citations on traffic does not depend on the identity of the outlet or on the type of the news event cited. Crucially, it does not change after the law, suggesting that users do not respond to Yandex’s decision to penalize independent media. As a result, Yandex holds the power to substantially alter the market shares of upstream news outlets. Finally, this talk shows evidence that news outlets modify their production decisions in response to changes in Yandex’s algorithms, specializing in longer stories and optimizing their articles less in response to fewer references from Yandex.