Russia’s search giant Yandex has “handed over” Moi Krug, a major professional social network which it acquired back in 2007, to Thematic Media (TM), a publisher of several online tech publications. The transaction was confirmed earlier this month by a Yandex representative to business daily Vedomosti, but no details of the deal have been disclosed.
Yandex recently stopped several projects which it judged to be too far from its core businesses. In 2014 the company shut down its blogging platform, Ya.ru, due to Internet users’ shift to social networks.
“Obviously, the majority of people prefer to write and communicate in social networks on other platforms. In this situation, it becomes complicated and inexpedient to support Ya.ru. Therefore, we have decided to close it,” Yandex then stated.
For similar reasons, in early 2013, Yandex handed over its ‘Narod’ website hosting activities to website builder and hoster uCoz.
TM, which intends to merge Moi Krug with its own professional social network, Brainstorage.me. Among the group’s other publications are Megamozg and popular tech blog Habrababr.
