Russia: Yandex Books service revealed audience data and made a bet on neural network voice acting

In June 2025, the digital service "Yandex Books" for the first time published official statistics on the monthly audience. According to the data provided, about 5.2 million subscribers of the Yandex Plus ecosystem regularly use the platform to read and listen to books. The calculations included users who interact with the service through the mobile app, web version, as well as through Yandex Music and the Alice voice assistant.

The calculation method was based on real content consumption: only those users who read more than 1,900 characters (equivalent to about 2.5 pages of text on a smartphone screen) or listened to at least two minutes of an audiobook were counted. This allows you to more accurately determine the actual audience engagement, and not just the fact of entering the app. The company emphasizes that it is after overcoming such a "threshold" level that the reader often completes the work he started.

The service became part of the basic Yandex Plus subscription in the fall of 2024, which opened up access to the product for a wide audience — according to the results of the first quarter of 2025, its number exceeded 41.3 million people. To attract attention to books, the platform uses a whole range of marketing and technological tools: from large-scale promotional campaigns and integration of popular hits to intelligent recommendation systems that allow users to find relevant content faster.

The audiobook format is particularly important — it often becomes the user's first point of contact with literature within the digital environment. However, the availability of audio versions is not always guaranteed: publishers are not always ready to invest in professional voice acting. In response to this challenge, Yandex Books introduced automatic voice-over using neural network technologies. To date, more than 120,000 titles are already available in this format.

The emphasis on synthetic speech reflects a broader trend — the use of AI in content ecosystems as a tool for scaling and personalization. In the face of increasing competition in the digital consumption of knowledge and leisure, platforms that can offer convenience, diversity and technological innovation are strengthening their position as key players in the smart content market.