Russia Archive

comScore has released new stats for European Internet usage based on their World Metrix audience measurement service today. The report shows that Russia is leading Europe in Internet audience growth followed by France, Spain and Ireland. Russia’s Internet audience grew 27% from June 2007-June 2008.

As for Internet penetration in Europe, The Netherlands leads with 82% of the total population online. The Netherlands is followed by Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Switzerland. Based on what I am seeing, Switzerland appears to be pushing out the most new startups out of the top 5 European Internet penetration countries.

Quintura is reporting that the founder of Metalloinvest holding and owner of Kommersant publishing house, Alisher Usmanov is seeking a 10-20% stake in Russian search engine Yandex. Based on the current valuation for Yandex of $5 billion, this puts Usmanov’s stake at up to $1 billion.

Usmanov and his companies have minority stakes in the holding companies for mail.ru and Live Journal. This type of deal could put Usmanov into a strong position with the largest Russian mail provider and the largest Russian search engine. In case you were wondering, Yandex currently has 54% market share in Russian search while Google is at 19%.

Check out our exclusive interview with Yandex CTO Ilya Segalovich to learn more about the largest search engine in Russia.

Yakov is reporting that Digital Sky Technologies has obtained an additional 15% stake in Mail.ru from Tiger Global Management for $180-200 million. This moves Digital Sky Technologies’ into the majority stakeholder position with 50.6%. Yakov also notes, "It’s also reported that DST could be selling a controlling stake in itself to Alisher Usmanov, founder of Metalloinvest and owner of Kommersant publishing house. Kommersant recently merged its online newspaper Gazeta.ru into LiveJournal’s owner SUP."

Mail.ru has 6.2 million daily visitors and 14.7 million monthly visitors and one of the stakeholders reported income of $56 million for year 2007. DST’s assets range somewhere between $1.1 billion and $3 billion.

Mail.ru was voted one of the top Web sites in Russia earlier this year.

Yakov is reporting that Russian financial group Finam along with a group of Russian investors have acquired a minority stake in Deluxe Television. There are plans to increase the share to 50% by year-end. Deluxe Television is a Munich-based broadcaster of music television channels. Yakov notes a daily audience for Deluxe Television of 5 million people and he explains the current state of Deluxe Television:

Founded in 2004, Deluxe owns a free-to-air music television channel, Deluxe Music, seven pay-TV music channels (rock, soul, lounge, jazz, etc), two radio stations, the music label Sashimi Records. It also has an online shop where users can download songs and buy DVDs, CDs and merchandise. Deluxe tests a high-definition music channel to be launched later in 2008.

You might remember the name Finam as they were the venture capital firm for Russian contextual ad firm Begun which was recently acquired by Google.

Yakov is reporting that Prague-based game and software publisher 1C Company has agreed to aquire Russian video game creator Buka. The deal is reported at an estimated $80 million. BUKA generated revenues of $35 million and EBITDA of $10 million in 2007.

Yakov notes regarding Buka, "BUKA, which was founded in 1993, has 250 employees. BUKA published games Far Cry, Half Life series, War Hammer 40,000: Dawn of Warfrom from Western publishers including THQ, Ubisoft, Valve, Codemasters, Lesta Studio, Targem, and CDV."

Check out the list of the top 10 Russian Web sites and the top Russian search engines.

Russian leader in search Yandex has announced plans to acquire SMIlink, a provider of traffic services. Yakov over at Quintura has the details on the acquisition. Note that SMIlink’s traffic services are not Web traffic-based but rather actual traffic out in the streets of Russia.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. SMIlink has a staff of about 70.

Check out our in-depth interview with Yandex CTO Ilya Segalovich. Yandex was also rated one of the top 10 Web sites in Russia by GOAL.

Russian consulting firm GOAL is out today with a new report that shows the top Web sites in Russia. The report is a great read if you are interested in learning more about Russia and its Web economy. There’s also a discussion of international players in Russia which includes Google, YouTube, LiveJournal, RapidShare and Yahoo.

The report includes the following categories: Social networks, blogs, photos, videos, news, dating, Q&A, bookmarking, music, citations, search engines and RSS, file storage, wish lists and start pages.

There’s only one issue with the report. They used Alexa as their sole basis of measurement to rank the sites. While that basically makes the actual numbers very suspect, I’d still recommend reading the site for the information provided about each site.  You can download the entire report here (it’s free).

Here are their Top 10 Russian Web Sites (remember that the list is generated by Alexa rankings):

Vkontakte.ru – a successful clone of Facebook. Vkontakte is the most visited site in Russia. It has over 13 million registered users.

Mail.ru is Russia’s leading mail portal, which has grown to include many other social networking features.

Yandex.ru is Russia’s leading search engine, with additional services including email, news etc. The search engine is optimised for the morphology of Russian language.

Odnoklassniki.ru has been sweeping Russia by storm. It is a simple tool to find schoolmates. Odnoklassniki is the fourth most visited site and has 18 million registered users.

Rambler.ru is another very successful search engine. It offers services such as photo and video sharing, dating and games. It owns Russia’s most popular messenger / VoIP phone system ICQ.

LiveInternet.ru is Russia’s leading website of personal blogs, but in reality it combines various online services including web mail, dating and file sharing.

LiveJournal.ru, the US blogging site, has become a phenomenon in Russia, forming the most lively uncensored information portal. From journalists and government critics to pop singers and comedians, many well known personalities share their views on current events.

Loveplanet.ru is Russia’s leading dating website, which claims to have 11 million registered users.

Smotri.ru is Russian analog of YouTube, and despite rated by Alexa at the place number 36, has shown the highest level of visits amongst the independent video sharing sites with the exception of YouTube itself.

Diary.ru is a blogging site, which allows its users to form communities.