Talenthouse.com, an international platform that provides emerging talents and little known performers, artists, and creative types with opportunities to work with leading artists and brands, officially launched a Russian version of its web site last month, following a 6-month pre-release period.
“Russia has a lot of talented people, but not many sources where aspiring artists can go to find opportunities. Most existing places – usually covering just one or two specific industries – are intended for artists with some experience,” said Talenthouse Russia’s country manager Naida Volkova in an exchange with East-West Digital News. “We also noticed that a lot of our users come from outside big cities such as Moscow and St.Petersburg, where they obvioulsy would have more opportunities.”
“Russia has its own rules and peculiarities,” Volkova added. “But the mentality is still close to a Western viewpoint and localization is not that difficult compared to Asian countries.”
Talenthouse created a group on Vkontakte, Russia’s leading social network, that currently has more than 13,000 members, up 12% in one month. The company also plans user account integration with Vkontakte – it has already integrated itself with Facebook – but Talenthouse could not tell EWDN when integrated functioning will be available.
Volkova said that Russia ranks “among the top five countries” forTalenthouse, but declined to provide any traffic or user base figures related to Russia.
Talenthouse has partnered with a number of Russian media sites as well as sites from the music, design, and photography industries. “Our partnership with Free-lance.ru has helped us develop a good community for designers. Through Photodom.com, we connected a young photographer with the rock band Maroon5. He became their official photographer for one of the destinations on their world tour,” says Volkova.
But the site has yet to develop cooperations with Russian brands and celebrities. For the moment, most of them come from the US. “Applicants may be asked to send videos in English, and this poses a problem for some Russians,” Sergey Belousov told EWDN. Belousov is a student from Nabererzhnye Chelny, Tatarstan – approximately 800 km east of Moscow. He became administrator of the Talenthouse group on Vkontakte after he participated in a competition through the site to work for Lady Gaga.
Talenthouse focuses on film, fashion, music, art / design, and photography. Its team is located in Palo Alto, Los Angeles, New York, and London. Its Russian operations have been organized from the Palo Alto office.
