Meanwhile, Rambler, the original control owner of Begun, continues to compete with Google as a search engine which is now richer than it was before with having, according to its own press release, a net cash position of $100 million to pursue “further investments and acquisitions in line with Rambler’s stated strategy.” Begun is known to have typically paid lower prices to publishers and cost less for advertisers - no doubt the Google involvement will change that in some way.

The English press release is available here.

In 2010, Google believes its operations in Russia could be tapping a billion dollar Internet advertising market. 2007 saw Russia grow to a $200 million bonanza in online ads. Two years from now may make that a fleeting, unprofitable memory.

Vladmir Dolgov said online advertising as a whole has caught fire in Russia, with 75,000 companies out of three million registered firms indulging in online ads. Online ad sales reached $200 million last year and have more than doubled every year for the past four, Dolgov said.

Russia will have almost 40 million personal computers this year, according to a Communications Ministry forecast, up from more than 31 million last year. The number of Internet users in the country of 142 million people will rise to 46 million, up from 35 million in 2007.

Yandex still dominates the market in Russia but Google appears to have moved Russia to a higher priority lately as they fight for users.

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. Arkady Volozh, a popular figure in the Russian new media scene will continue in his post as head of the company.

“We did not hesitate to go the extra mile to find this rare talent,” said Arkady Volozh, CEO of Yandex, the parent company. “We are excited to add a leading technology and business veteran in Silicon Valley to the Yandex team. Vish and his group at Yandex Labs will help to develop and improve Yandex’s core technology capabilities including the quality of algorithmic search for the Russian audience.”

Source: Yandex News

He said 300 million people worldwide used Russian media and that a Cyrillic domain name would be a key part of raising the importance of the language, a task he said was his personal priority as president.

“We must do everything we can to make sure that we achieve in the future a Cyrillic Internet domain name — it is a pretty serious thing. It is a symbol of the importance of the Russian language and Cyrillic. … And I think we have a rather high chance of achieving such a decision.”

Medvedev is certainly the most tech-savvy head of state Russia has seen, he has publicly used his mobilephone to connect to the Internet and says he surfs inline every morning for news.

The Russians wish to have the first true IDN extension on the Internet, .RF (.рф). Unlike other IDN domains currently available, where the extension itself remains in Latin characters, full IDN domains will be entirely in the non-Latin character sets. The viability of these domains is beng discussed at the ICANN meeting later this month in Paris.

While the application of presidential influence may well help the Russian cause, ICANN still has issues with the continued use of the .SU (Soviet Union) extension. After many requests to the operators to “to freeze new registrations”, this extension is still being actively promoted. In fact their last reaction to ICANN’s demands was to slash prices by 50%. This move quadrupled the number of SU users from 11′000 to more than 45′000, making it even more of a headache to decommission. However, it is increasingly looking like a compromise will be in the form of an exchange between .SU and .RF (.рф). With that in mind registration of .SU would seem a smart move at the moment, as users domain names would be transferred, without further application.

Russia is seeing major growth in advertising expenditure, with spending across all media is predicted to increase by 20% in both 2008 and 2009, with online advertising predicted to grow by over 50%. A shift towards digital consumption means that Russia’s online users now stands at 25 million and is growing at over 25% annually.

“The recent growth of Russia has made Europe’s ‘Big Five’ markets a ‘Big Six’,” said Aegis CEO Robert Lerwill. “AdWatch brings us a significant competitive advantage in a market where demand for digital services is outstripping supply.”

Source: Sharecast | Aegis PR

Meanwhile Google is looking to improve their performance in Russia, Google co-founder Sergei Brin said in an interview in Moscow last week.

“Yandex received about twice as many searches in Russia per day than Google”, Brin said, “We think our search is better, but [Yandex] also has many talented people”.

Google, IPO, Russia, Yandex]]> http://www.multilingual-search.com/russian-yandex-moves-closer-to-ipo/30/05/2008feed http://www.multilingual-search.com/russians-snub-icann-with-idn-su-registrations/14/04/2008 http://www.multilingual-search.com/russians-snub-icann-with-idn-su-registrations/14/04/2008#comments Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:23:28 +0000 Nick Wilsdon ICANNRU DomainRussiaSU Domains http://www.multilingual-search.com/russians-snub-icann-with-idn-su-registrations/14/04/2008 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 far, September saw ICANN release a statement urging “the current .SU operators to make it clear to the .SU registrants the issues surrounding the domain, as well as to freeze new registrations until its future is clear”.

In response the .SU operators announced an 80% price cut to their domain in the Russian press, bringing it into line with .RU pricing and the launch of IDN (international) version of the domain extension. Not exactly the reaction ICANN must have been hoping for.

ICANN soon dispatched a team to Russia to discuss the situation, happily reporting that the SU operators had seen reason and holding a letter from from Alexei Platonov and Alexei Soldatov on the .SU ccTLD RosNIIROS. The letter indicated a willingness to talk about the issue of decommissioning but saw this within a time frame of 10-15 years. However, first they would fully investigate the possibility of keeping the extension running and obtaining special “exceptionally reserved” status (like .EU which does not pertain to any one country).

The Russians were a little less candid on the point of freezing new registrations but did agree to inform the SU community about the talks and possibility of future migration.

It’s been hard to see that conversation in the Russian press. Article carry positive quotes from the PR department of RU-Center, talking of the future for the domain and of ICANN backing down over the issue. Rumors have been circulated about a possible third IDN extension, .RF (Russian Federation) in exchange for letting the .SU decommission. As promised though, on November 1st 2007, the price of SU was slashed. While there were only 10’000 subscribers at the beginning of that year, there are now over 45’000.

Today a new volley was fired, as SU opened the sunrise period for IDN registrations. Far from winding down the extension, they are actively promoting it and expect, according to their own figures, to see 30-40% new registrations over the coming months.

According to Andrei Vorobyov, Head of Public Relations for the Regional Network Information Center (RU-Center), who operate the domain, “In the future, we have plans to expand the number of languages used in the IDN .SU domain, including all the national languages of the people of Russia.”

Although RU-Center has made all the right noises to ICANN, their actions have pointed to a deliberate promotion of the domain. This has caused the number of their users to spiral, giving weight to their arguments to keep the domain. All eyes are on ICANN now to see how they deal with this latest snub to their authority. At the moment, it seems there is little the international organization can do to stop the Russians.

To cover this gap in the market, many turn to online payments systems such as Yandex Money and WebMoney. Yandex is reported to be signing up 3000 new users each day and WebMoney now claims to have 5m users. There are still issues with these systems, transferring money to and from them is hardly convenient. Dedicated top-up machines have sprung up in shops and supermarkets which allow Russians to transfer cash to a range of services, from WebMoney to their mobilephone. Other methods include scratch cards or money transfers via the banks or post offices. Yandex has recently announced a partnership scheme with Russian banks, to allow the same functionality at their ATMs.

DGCmagazine.com has covered WebMoney in depth for their April magazine and I would recommend it to anyone looking to trade in Russia. WebMoney are very open to relationships with foreign companies and this magazine contains a good introduction to their service.

View the April Edition of DGC Magazine (free PDF)

Yandex Money is a system similar to PayPal. Registration in the system is free and depositing money into the system is done without commission. Withdrawing money is charged at 2%. The system is open to merchants dealing in Russia but is currently restricted to Russian registered businesses.

“Together with the Russian Development Bank, we have developed a reliable and secure scheme of interacting between the virtual bank account and card withdrawals” said Yevgeny Zavalishina, CEO of Yandex.Money.”We’re ready to join other Russian banks and are open to cooperation with all market participants.”

Source: Yandex

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 now also provide free anti-virus cover for the users. Yandex estimate they have 200,000 users of the Ya Online service.

Ya Online can be download here

Source: Yandex News

Of course Google dominated the study, with 62% audience share, followed by Yahoo! with 12.8%. Microsoft came in 4th with 2.9%. Yandex the Russian search engine now appears on the statistics, with 0.9%.

Source: ComScore

The conference itself is free of charge and will take place on the 16th-18th April 2008 at the luxurious BOR hotel just outside Moscow. There were over 120 sessions last year with a banquet held on the first night.

I’ll be attending the conference as usual, with several of my team. Although the talks are usually in Russian, the conference can arrange personal translators. If any Multilingual Search readers do want to attend leave a message in the comments and I will be glad to help you.

Google Translated version of CIB-2008

Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Renaissance Capital have been hired to organise an offering, according to the Russian newspaper Vedomosti.

“The size of the offering has not yet been defined”, the source continued.”The company has no emergency need of money, and the bulk of the proceeds will go to the shareholders who decide to sell their shares”

The search engine could raise as much as $3 billion in the IPO, making it the country’s biggest high-tech flotation, according to Kommersant, another Russian national paper.

We have been here before though, with IPO rumours circulating in March 2006. As before, there has been no official comment from Yandex confirming or denying this move. Although it is widely accepted that Yandex will make an IPO, anyone following this story knows there is no rush on their part. It will be interesting to watch their movements running up to this autumn but continued slow down in the global markets may well change their plans.

Badoo’s social networking site with photo and video sharing has 12.7 million registered accounts, mostly in Latin America and Continental Europe. Badoo was launched from London in November 2006 and was the number two fastest rising search term on the Google Zeitgeist list for 2007. It will go up against several other russian sites including Odnoklassniki.ru, Vkontakte.ru and Moikrug.ru which have all attracted several million users each. And now the Russian version of MySpace, which launched only last week.

Badoo’s main pitch is that it carries no advertising, avoiding the kinds of issues Facebook had with Beacon. Instead, Badoo derives its main revenue from offering users the chance to pay to be popular. Instead, Badoo derives its main revenue from offering users the chance to pay to be popular.

The issue here is that the Russian suffix .ru tranliterates into Cyrillic as .py or Paraguay’s domain name. Icann confirms that Russia is looking for the .rf domain name to make a Russian-cyrillic-character internet interoperable with the latin character net. Additionally, without a transliterating suffix, the result would be an non-interconnected Russia internet.

The development may involve Russia having its own root servers which would give the Russian government direct control over that part of the web. It could potentially issue passwords for people to obtain permission to access the global part of the web outside of Russia - or inside for that matter.

- There are now 3.1m blogs in Runet, 2.6 times larger than this time last year.

- The blogosphere in Russia represents 3% of the global total but this figure is now larger than the share of Russian users (2%)

- Now there are more Russian language blogs than French, German or Portuguese ones, but less than blogs in Spanish, Italian, Chinese, English or Japanese.

- More than 75% of Russian blogs host on liveinternet.ru, livejournal.com, blogs.mail.ru, diary.ru and loveplanet.ru

- About 7000 new blogs appear daily in Runet. There are about 120′000′000 recorded there now.

- Most blogs (60%) belong to female bloggers. However this figure has fallen since the first quarter this year (64%).

- The average blogger is 22 years old (1 year increase on last year)

- About 70% live in Russia, largest other geographic locations are USA and Ukraine.

- 1/3 of Russian bloggers have 10 friends

Blog Usage

The diagram below shows the total number of active blogs (yellow) per platform. The blue lines indicate abandoned blogs.

The full report in Russian can be downloaded here.

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 analyst at UralSib, another factor in their favour would be their established brand and well-honed technology. Russia’s social networking market is currently dominated by Yandex owned, MoiKrug (”My Circle”) and Vkontakte.ru.

Vitaly Kupeyev, an analyst at AlfaBank, said that although the online advertising market being targetted by MySpace was a fast growing segment, it still only makes up 2% of the market. “A lot depends on MySpace’s marketing strategies”, Kupeyev said. “The projection for Internet advertising for 2012 is a mere 5% of the total ad market”,

However the local offerings are not struggling. Vkontakte.ru claims 2 million users and is now ranked the third most visited site in Runet. MoiKrug, which follows a similar style to the LinkedIn.com site, is ranked in 95th place according to Alexa.

Yandex editor Yelena Kolmanovskya welcomed MySpace’s plans to develop a Russian language version and said the site would not come into “direct competition with MoiKrug.”

Source: Moscow Times

Each report will also provide a snapshot of search engine usage and activity around the world, which can be compared against for the following year. This should help identify growth or decline for the search engines in each local market.

In the 2007 report we have covered the following 17 countries:

• Bulgaria - Georgi Georgiev (Investor BG PLC)
• China - David Temple (China Search Marketing Tour)
• Czech Republic | Slovakia - Katerina Rotterova (BenedaGroup.com)
• Denmark - Rasmus Sørensen (TLA Media)
• Estonia - Robin Gurney (Altex Marketing)
• Iceland - Kristjan Mar Hauksson (Nordic eMarketing)
• Israel - Gilad Sasson (Search Marketing)
• Italy - Sante Achille (Search Engine Consultant)
• Japan - Motoko Hunt (AJPR)
• Portugal - Nuno Hipólito (Search Marketing)
• Russia | Ukraine - Nick Wilsdon (e3internet)
• South Korea - Ebina Cho
• Spain - Oscar Carreras (WebCertain)
• The Netherlands - Peter Kersbergen (WebCertain)
• United Kingdom - Andy Atkins-Krüger (WebCertain)

The report can be downloaded free of charge by clicking the following link.

 Download Global Search Report 2007 21 Pages (1.3MB)

In December 2006 and January 2007, Prof-Media, a leading Russian diversified media company, acquired in a series of transactions approximately 55% of Rambler Media’s issued and ordinary share capital. Currently, Prof-Media does not envisage any further significant purchases of shares in the Company. Rambler Media’s shares are listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange and Prof-Media is interested in their healthy trading market and further appreciation.

ICANN has again, “urged the current .SU operators to make it clear to the .SU registrants the issues surrounding the domain, as well as to freeze new registrations until its future is clear” .

In response the .SU operators have announced an 80% price cut to celebrate their 17 year anniversary and plans for a new IDN .SU. This would bring the pricing for .SU into line with .RU and boost registration numbers.

While the .SU operators are keen to stress “relations are friendly”, this dispute is gaining momentum.