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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MySpace, the popular social networking site has announced plans to roll out a Russian language version to capitalise on the country’s fast-growing Internet advertising business.
Alexa currently ranks MySpace in 55th place in Russia but analysts say their competitive advantage lies in coming to a market with mainly weak players. According to Konstantine Belov, media […]

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The Global Search Report is an annual compilation of search engine usage and PPC statistics from countries around the world. The aim of the report is to raise the profile of markets outside the usual well reported US/UK sphere and should provide essential information to those interested in multilingual marketing.
Each report will also provide […]

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Prof-Media has issued a formal response to the rumours circulating in the Russian press concerning their delisting on the London Stock Exchange. Prof-Media is the majority share holder in Rambler Media, the company operating the Rambler search engine portal in Russia and the majority shareholder in the PPC engine Begun.ru.

In December 2006 and January […]

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The research group comScore has released their first report looking at worldwide search activity, carried out over the month of August. Interesting reading to those dealing with multilingual marketing and a sign of the growing importance of this sector.
The Asia-Pacific region, which includes large markets such as China, Japan and India, saw 258 million […]

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As reported in February, ICANN is continuing attempts to delete the .SU (Soviet Union) domain extension. Pressure has increased after the successful decommissioning of the .YU (Yugoslavia) address this week, where operators for the new extensions .RS for Serbia and .ME for Montenegro agreed to migrate existing users.
ICANN has again, “urged the current .SU […]

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Estonia’s first ever search marketing conference (E! 10) will be held at 2pm on September 13th at the Sõprus Cinema in Tallinn’s old town. 250+ people are expected for the event organised by Altex Marketing
Speakers and their subjects are:
Robin Gurney, altex marketing: Driving search engine users to your company website.
Kain Kalju, Neti Webmaster: Search engines […]

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This week Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia decided to remove the ability for webmasters to view incoming links to their sites (or backlinks as they are commonly known). Previously this had been possible by two methods, the first using a search operator [link=”www.domain.com”] and secondly through their advanced search page.
The function was […]

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According to Verisign, InsideDomaining reports, the Top 3 countries with the highest growth rate for their country code top-level-domain extensions are the following:
1. China: .cn (402% increase)
2. Russia: ru
3. South Korea: .kr
China (.cn) has now become the fifth most popular country code extension globally, […]

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Rambler have taken a controlling 51% stake in the PPC service, Begun.ru. In much the same way as Overture of old, Begun.ru provides a contextual advertising stream to site partners, Rambler being their largest.
Rambler previously acquired a 25.1% stake in Begun in 2005 for a purchase price of US$750,000, at which time the Group […]

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