Yandex and Rambler have teamed up in an bilateral exchange of search and advertising services. Starting today, Rambler’s search services will be powered by Yandex and Rambler will join Yandex.Direct, Yandex’s Ad Network.
Ads placed via Yandex.Direct will also now run in Rambler’s search results, as well as on the pages of its hosted content. In addition to the Yandex.Direct ads, Rambler will continue to show ads placed via Begun, a contextual advertising platform acquired by Google in 2008 in which Rambler kept interests. Under the partnership agreement, the two systems will share advertising space on search results pages. To give Begun’s advertising clients the opportunity to run their ads in any placement position on Rambler, the system can place their ads via Yandex.Direct. Also, these ads can run on Yandex’s search results pages and on the pages of websites in the Yandex Ad Network.
Yandex.Direct is the largest automated, auction based ad-serving system for contextual advertising on the Russian internet. Ads purchased on a cost-per-click basis are displayed on search results pages and on websites in the Yandex Ad Network.
Rambler, one of the earliest search engines and web portals on the Russian Internet, has been in operation since 1996. In the late 1990s Rambler was the leading search engine in the Russian-language Internet but today only holds 2% of the market, lagging far behind Yandex, Google and Mail.ru, according to LiveInternet.ru. Its search audience nevertheless totals to 4.2 million, reaching 14% of Russian Internet users, according to the company.
Rambler was merged with other web companies in July 2010 by its main shareholder the Prof-Media group, a management company for a number of media assets belonging to Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin.
