In late April, Relevant Media, a project of Internet startup developer Fastlane Ventures, raised $1.4 million from a group of undisclosed individual investors.
With its three properties – the “how-to” portal Kakprosto.ru, women’s site Justlady.ru, and Pinterest clone Pinme.ru, – Relevant Media claims an audience of 18 million unique visitors, making it one of the 10 largest Russian Internet media groups.
Relevant Media’s leading business, Kakprosto.ru, contains a library of more than 250,000 answers for the most common questions asked on the web. In terms of traffic, the site is ahead of its competitors – Shkolazhniki.ru and even the corresponding sections of Google and Mail.ru, – according to the company.
“Currently we see a surge of interest in projects related to knowledge generation and exchange. Most of such projects are in the area of education (Coursera, BeSmart etc). At the same time, there is a huge and poorly structured segment, which we call the “exchange of life experience. It is represented in a large number of forums, thematic websites and blogs, plenty of which are unstructured, unmoderated and deliver poor quality content,” said Relevant Media CEO and co-founder Andrey Kuzeev.
“Our mission is to build a unified platform, where people who are real experts in their own fields can share their experience and give advice to those seeking it,” Kuzeev concluded.
The latest capital injection will be used to create new content, develop a social advice network and a mobile application. Already almost 20% of Relevant Media’s audience use the service from a mobile device.
Although Fastlane does not reveal the financials of its properties, its representative Ivan Zhdakaev told East-West Digital News that Relevant Media is “EBITDA positive.”
Prior to the lastest round, Fastlane invested $2 million in the project, Zhdakaev indicated.
