Mail.ru Group, a leading player on the Russian Internet market, has just launched two new services on its top two web properties: a real-time news and blog search on its Mail.ru portal and a streaming audio and sharing application on its Odnoklassniki.ru social network.
The first service, labelled discussion search, enables users of the Mail.ru portal to search through 10,000 news sites, over 20,000 blogs, and over 350,000 micro blogs in real time. The second service, the new music application on Odnoklassniki.ru, Russia’s second-largest social network after VKontakte.ru, enables users to upload their own MP3s and stream music directly from the website. The streaming music function is still being developed and is available to only 10% of all Odnoklassniki.ru users, but the social network intends to open the new service to all subscribers by the end of June. It also anticipates that the music feature will eventually become a subscription-based service providing licensed music to the social network’s users for a fee.
The new Mail.ru Group services are arriving on an already competitive market. The Discussion search in particular will compete head-to-head with two services of web search leader Yandex, Yandex.News which had 11.6 million unique visitors in March this year, and Yandex.Blogs, with 2.9 million unique users in the same period. The Discussion search also runs the risk of cannibalizing some users from Mail.ru’s own news search engine, which served 9.6 million unique users this March – second on the market after Yandex.News.
The Odnoklassniki.ru music application has more chances than Mail.ru to succeed in competing against Yandex, at least in terms of the number of users. Yandex.Music had 3 million unique visitors in March, a number that Odnoklassniki.ru could surpass should its music application become popular among its approximately 20 million monthly users. Odnoklassniki.ru, however, will need to make rapid progress in audio content licensing if it wants to catch up with Yandex.Music, whose catalog already includes 1.8 million tracks from Russian and international artists provided through non-exclusive agreements with more than 50 copyright holders.
