The Rambler-Afisha group invested “hundreds of thousand dollars” in Ichiba.ru, Rambler founder Anton Terekhov told the RIA Novosti news agency last week. Launched in April of last year, Ichiba.ru is an e-commerce marketplace allowing any merchant to present and sell its products online easily. Ichiba claims its catalog includes 3.5 million items from over 400 merchants.
Among Rambler’s other e-commerce properties are the price comparison service Price.ru, the theater ticket sales service Rambler Kassa, and Rambler Avia, an air ticket sales site launched last year.
Rambler is one of the earliest search engines and web portals on the Russian Internet, in operation since 1996. In the late 1990s Rambler was the leading search engine in the Russian-language Internet, but today it holds only 2% of the market, lagging far behind Yandex, Google, and Mail.ru.
The Rambler-Afisha group was formed in 2010 by merging the Internet assets of its main shareholder, the Prof-Media group. In June of last year, the group announced the establishment of a new fund targeting startups. In July, the group acquired Kanobu Network, the leading Russian network gaming site.
According to ComScore, the monthly audience of the group’s properties in Russia reached 23.5 million unique users aged 15 and older in Russia in November 2011, which represented a 5% increase over the previous month. ComScore ranked the group among those with the fastest growing online audience in Europe.
