Yandex, Russia’s leading search engine and major Internet group, announced yesterday that it acquired KinoPoisk (in Russian: “Cinema Search”), the largest Russian language portal on movies, TV programs and celebrities. This site’s database contains 100 million movie descriptions and ratings with associated trailers, user commentaries and advertising. Each month, it attracts nearly 16 million unique users aged from 12 to 64 in Russia, according to TNS’s latest reports.
Neither the valuation of the company nor the other terms of the deal have been disclosed, but Yandex told East-West Digital News that the existing shareholders – the French company AlloCiné and the two site founders Vitaly Tatsis and Vitaly Sukhanov – had fully sold their respective 40% and 60% stakes.
According to industry insiders, the site’s valuation may have been in the range of $50 million.
Tatsis was a 23-year movie aficionado when he founded KinoPoisk back in 2003 with former university classmate Dmitry Sukhanov. Although it had to compete with a number of earlier movers on the market, such as Film.ru or Kinokadr.ru, KinoPoisk asserted itself over the years as the number one destination for movie-related topics.
One of the main factors of KinoPoisk’s success has been its content base, which was initially inspired – and perhaps partially copied – from US site IMDb.
In 2007, already attracting one million users per month, the resource received a capital injection of $1.2 million from DST/Mail.ru, a leading Russian tech fund and Internet group, in exchange for a 40% stake.
Two years later, DST yielded its stake to France’s AlloCiné, a portfolio company of Tiger Global Management. This deal might have been connected with Tiger’s acquisition of a stake in Mail.ru, the Russian edition of Forbes recently reported.
Lately KinoPoisk held discussions with several Russian and foreign potential acquirers, Kommersant reported. Among them was AFK Sistema, a major Russian holding that owns online video portal Stream.ru.
From recommendation algorithms to a new vertical?
Yandex made it clear that KinoPoisk will remain on its current domain, even though its team will be “smoothly integrated.”
“Our mission is to answer users’ questions,” Vladimir Isaev of Yandex’s press service explained to EWDN. “We’re going to build a recommendation service to answer all questions about TV content and movies – how good are they according to the KinoPoisk community, where to watch them, when will DVDs be released and so on. For this, we will use our machine-learning, personalization and targeting technologies in order to provide the best possible answer to the users of KinoPoisk’s content base.”
Is Yandex, possibly inspired by Google, creating “another vertical category,” as suggested by TechCrunch?
The Russian search giant, which already owns a popular online video search and aggregator, might indeed be interested in an acquisition in this field, as analyzed in EWDN’s latest report on the Russian online video industry.
Yandex, however, declined to comment on potential synergies between KinoPoisk and its existing video aggregator, as well as on rumored discussions with independent online video sites.
