Mail.ru Group, the London Stock Exchange-listed Russian Internet group, marked a symbolic victory in its battle for leadership over the Russian Internet against search behemoth Yandex.
At the end of last year and for the first time since 2008, the group’s portal and e-mail service Mail.ru overtook Yandex in terms of traffic for two successive months. According to TNS Russia, the search engine attracted 29.39 million unique users from Russia between the ages of 12 and 54 in November and 29.91 million in December, compared to 29.43 and 29.97 million for Mail.ru.
Mail.ru’s success could be explained by its recent steps toward integration with other properties of the Mail.ru Group. Since last September, Russian business daily Vedomosti reported, the popular social network Odnoklassniki.ru has been offering links to the Mail.ru home page and webmail service as well as to Moi Mir, another social networking site controlled by the group.
Yandex, however, remains the leader in terms of weekly audience, indicated the company’s spokesman Ochir Mandchirov in an exchange with Vedomosti, with as many as 18 million users each week in December, or 2.2 million more than Mail.ru. Yandex hopes to attract an even larger audience this year with the launch of new services.
Yandex is struggling on another front with Google. In the summer and fall of last year, Yandex’s share of the domestic search market fell from approximately 64% to 61%, while Google saw its share rise to 25%, compared to 21.5% in 2010. But Yandex stabilized its position in November at 60.8%, according to LiveInternet.ru, a website traffic ranking site, which measures visits to other sites generated by search engines.
