According to Vkontakte.ru’s co-founder and General Manager Pavel Durov, “Mail.ru Group’s ad sales teams give bribes to ad buyers openly and at a massive scale.” Durov posted the accusation in a discussion on Facebook yesterday, according to the online business publication Marker.ru and IT news and forum site Roem.ru.
An LSE-listed Russian Internet company, Mail.ru Group owns two other social networks – Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir, placing it in competition with Vkontakte, the market leader. But Mail.ru Group also owns a 40% stake in Vkontakte.
Durov’s relations with his Mail.ru Group partners have been deteriorating. In March of this year, Durov proclaimed the idea of fully integrating his site to Mail.ru Group, suggested just days before by the group’s General Manager Dmitry Grishin, as “utopian.”
In July, Durov referred to Mail.ru Group as a “trash holding” on Twitter. The message was accompanied by a disrespectful photo of Durov’s “official answer to Mail.ru Group’s last attempt to absorb Vkontakte.” Durov also condemned Mail.ru’s file hosting service, ‘files.mail.ru,’ as “a tasteless warehouse of viruses and warez,” thus justifying the fact that Vkontakte had blocked access to it.
The bribery accusations will hardly come as a surprise to observers of the Russian advertising market, which is admittedly far from for being transparent.
