The personalized Google Discover recommendations feed deprived the Tsargrad TV channel and the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper of millions of views. The Agency writes about this with reference to LiveInternet.
According to statistical data, the number of transitions from the Discover service to the Komsomolskaya Pravda website fell from 15 million in the week from October 30 to November 5 to 72 thousand in the week from November 13 to 19. The number of transitions to Tsargrad during similar periods decreased from 2.2 million to 13.7 thousand.
As the Agency notes, restrictions in the recommendations feed led to the fact that Komsomolskaya Pravda dropped from the first in fifth place in the “News and Media” category in the LiveInternet ranking. “Tsargrad” takes fourth place in the ranking, since the publication was able to significantly increase the number of transitions from a similar service “Zen”.
Discover has limited the issuance of not all Russian propaganda resources — for example, the service still contains Life.ru publications. According to LiveInternet, the site was among the ten resources that received the most traffic through the Google Discover recommendations feed.
The audience lost by Tsargrad and Komsomolskaya Pravda moved to Russian regional publications: the Murmansk Khibiny. Ru», the Novorossiysk «Nasha Gazeta», the Cherepovets publication GorodChe.ru and others.
On October 12, Bloomberg published information that despite Google's anti-war policy, the Discover feed offers users articles from propaganda publications — in particular, «Tsargrad» and «Komsomolskaya Pravda». The former head of Yandex News and founder of the True Story aggregator Lev Gershenzon also drew attention to this. According to his estimates, Discover provides 20-30 million clicks to propaganda resources per day.