According to The White African Blog, a new Ad network has been launched called Pamoja Media. Started by Joshua Wanyama (of AfricanPath) and Benin Mwangi (of Cheetah Index), it’s an ad network created to serve advertisers trying looking for a one-stop-shop for publishers in Africa, or that reach Africans in the diaspora.
Publisher requirements are quite […]

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Both WebProNews and Bloomburg are reporting on the comments made by Vladimir Dolgov, Head of Google Russia, that online ad sales will jump fivefold in Russia to reach $1 billion in 2010.
In 2010, Google believes its operations in Russia could be tapping a billion dollar Internet advertising market. 2007 saw Russia grow to a $200 […]

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Techcrunch reports of Ex-Yahoo SVP and General Manager of Search Vish Makhijani becoming Yandex CEO have been denied by the company in a press release today.
Vish Makhijani has indeed joined Yandex but in the position of President and CEO of their new US technology and business development facility, “Yandex Labs” based in Silicone Valley, US. […]

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev joined calls for the country to be assigned an Internet domain name in the Cyrillic script, reports the Moscow Times on Wednesday as part of a Kremlin drive to promote Russian as a global language.
He said 300 million people worldwide used Russian media and that a Cyrillic domain name would be […]

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The Moscow Times reports that Turkmenistan has begun to allow private citizens to connect to the internet. The national internet provider, Turkmentelekom, said on Thursday that it has been connecting up to 20 homes a day since the announcement, mainly in the capital city of Ashgabat. It has a waiting list of 2000 people.
Previously internet […]

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Aegis Group plc has bought AdWatch in Russia to make the UK media buyer’s digital marketing unit Isobar the country’s number one in online media. Moscow headquartered AdWatch, founded in 2000, has gross assets of €9.5m and works for clients such as Microsoft, VTB Bank, SUN Interbrew, Canon and Rolf.
Russia is seeing major growth in […]

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The Moscow Times reports that Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia, plans to raise $1.5b to $2b in a New York IPO this fall. Their source has said that these expectations are based on a preliminary valuation of Yandex at $5 billion.
Meanwhile Google is looking to improve their performance in Russia, Google co-founder Sergei […]

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Joop Dorresteijn has started a series of posts which aim to explore the South Korean internet market. The series is not complete yet but one to bookmark if you’re looking for information on one of the most active internet markets globally.

Introduction to the South-Korean web series
A profile of the connectivity in South Korea
Why so little […]

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As we reported back in February 2007, ICANN is still attempting to delete the obsolete SU (Soviet Union) extension but having little success. While they have managed to decommission the .YU (Yogoslavia) extension successfully they are finding rebellion among Russian webmasters, ISPs and the Registry itself.
To bring you up to date with the dispute so […]

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If you’re considering targeting the Russian audience, one of the first hurdles to overcome is how to deal with the local online payment methods. Credit cards have started to be distributed but they are expensive, with high interest rates, activation charges and a general lack of transparency in the charges. Many students and employees are […]

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Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia has announced a partnership with the Russian Development Bank (RBR). This will allow users of their online payment system, Yandex Money to transfer funds to and from the virtual account via the ATM machines owned by the bank.
Yandex Money is a system similar to PayPal. Registration in the […]

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Yandex, the leading search engine portal in Russia has signed a deal with Kaspersky Anti-Virus to bundle their product into their desktop application, Ya Online.
Ya Online is free desktop software, which connects to their mail service (Yandex Post), allows users to search and gives them information on the weather and traffic in Moscow. It will […]

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ComScore have released new statistics showing that the Chinese search giant, Baidu is now the third largest worldwide search property. In December 2007 there were 66.2billion search queries made worldwide, 3.4billion of them were done at Baidu giving it 5.2% of the audience share.
Of course Google dominated the study, with 62% audience share, followed […]

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New figures published by CyberSecurity.ru have shown the number of internet users in Ukraine rose by 1% between January and February of this year. There are now 7767005 (7.8m) unique users per month online in the country. That represents massive growth of 74% on the same period last year (4475888/ 4.4m users)
The Kiev region leads […]

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The third annual “Internet and Business” conference has been announced in Russia this week. CIB-2008 is the largest internet conference in Russia and last year attracted over 2000 visitors. All the leading lights of Runet will be in appearance, including Yandex, Begun, Mail.ru, Rambler and Google.
The conference itself is free of charge and will […]

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The Moscow Times reports that the leading Russian search engine, Yandex, plans for float shares in an IPO on New York’s Nasdaq stock exchange this fall. They have accredited this to a “banking source with knowledge of the matter”. Yandex is currently the most popular search engine in Russia with approximately 55% market coverage. In […]

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Techcrunch reports that social networking site Badoo has received $30m from Russian investor Finam for a 10% stake in the company. The funds are to build the service in Russia, where the social networking market has reached around 10m users in January.
Badoo’s social networking site with photo and video sharing has 12.7 million registered […]

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Russian search leader Yandex, has released their Autumn report on the current state of the blogosphere in Russia. As you might expect, the report is in Russian so I’ll give you some of the highlights here.
- There are now 3.1m blogs in Runet, 2.6 times larger than this time last year.
- The blogosphere in […]

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Vanessa Fox over at SearchEngineLand describes a new feature in Google Webmaster Central which allows you to set the geographic preference of your site. One of the main issues for people new to multilingual marketing is how to set up their website to be well ranked in a specific country, or even to be included […]

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