In a move illustrating growing demand on the Russian online advertising market, Yandex announced its rates for display advertising will increase next year by an average of 28%, Russian business daily Vedomosti reported yesterday based on exchanges with advertising agencies.
Yandex confirmed the news as well as the fact it revises its display advertising rates once per year. Last year, they increased rates by 24%.
Yandex, the leading Russian language search engine, offers over 30 services on its portal, from webmail to city maps to news aggregation. In October of this year, the portal’s traffic reached almost 30 million unique users aged between 12 and 54, according to TNS Russia.
Mail.ru Group, the market leader for display advertising, will not increase its rates next year, having already raised them by 50% for the second half of 2011. Mail.ru Group, however, expects its growing audience to generate more advertising revenues.
Spending for online advertisements on the Russian-language Internet grew to 21.86 billion rubles ($729 million) in 2010, an increase of 40% from 2009, MindShare Interaction estimated earlier this year. Contextual advertising represented 13.7 billion rubles ($457 million) or 63% of the total, whereas display advertising accounted for 8.16 billion rubles ($272 million) or 37% of the total.
