How much can news aggregators impact news consumption and upstream news production through changes in their algorithms?

We study this question by looking at the case ofRussia’s largest news aggregator, Yandex News, during the period from 2013 to 2018. An-alyzing the universe of articles published by 50 major online news outlets, we detect newsevents and classify whether they are sensitive for the government.

We then combine this data with Yandex’s top-5 news citations to estimate Yandex’s news aggregation algorithm.

We document 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.

We also show that Yandex’s top-5 citations have asignificant impact on outlets’ traffic; a full slate of Yandex’s citations can boost an outlet’straffic by almost 400 thousand daily visitors (between +23% and +1,000% for the outletsin our sample).

The impact of Yandex citations on traffic does not depend on the identityof the outlet or on the type of the news event cited. As a result, Yandex holds the power tosubstantially alter the market shares of upstream news outlets.

Finally, we show evidencethat news outlets modify their production decisions in response to changes in Yandex’salgorithms, specializing in longer stories and optimizing their articles less in response tofewer references from Yandex.

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