Yesterday, Mail.ru Group, the LSE-listed Russian Internet giant, announced it now fully controls Vkontakte (VK.com), the leading Russian language social network with over 250 million registered accounts and 60 million daily users. The group, which already owned 52% of the company, bought the remaining 48% stake from UCP, the Russian investment fund that had become a …
Twitter is holding negotiations to sell advertisements in Russia, three sources familiar with the talks told ITAR-TASS last week. “Twitter is in talks to implement their ads possibilities in Russia. The discussion has not evolved into precise parameters yet,” the Russian news agency quoted one of the sources as saying.
Russia’s largest social network, Vkontakte, may soon go under the full control of the Mail.ru Group, which is controlled by Kremlin-friendly oligarch Alisher Usmanov via his holding USM Holdings. Negotiations regarding the acquisition of the remaining 48% ownership from investment fund UCP, headed by Ilya Sherbovich, are in the final stages, according to people close …
Mail.ru Group in talks with UCP to fully acquire Vkontakte Read More
According to research by Yandex Ukraine, Ukrainians have created 40 million accounts on popular social networks like Odnoklassniki, Vkontakte (VK.com), Facebook, and Twitter as of summer 2014. Russian social networks still dominate the market, as 27 million accounts have been created on Vkontakte and 11 million have been created on Odnoklassniki, as opposed to only …
Russian social networks still market leaders in Ukraine Read More
In its accounts for the first half of 2014, Mail.ru Group has disclosed the sum it paid in April of this year to Ivan Tavrin for 12% of VKontakte, Russia’s leading social network also known as VK.com. The stake cost the group around $345 million, valuing the company at almost $2.9 billion. The LSE-listed Internet group thus owns 52% …
Mail.ru Group paid $345 million for its 12% stake in VKontakte Read More
The Ukrainian authorities may block Russian web resources which they believe to be responsible for propaganda, as well as those linked to the Donbass insurgency. “At the moment we are working at both the legal and technical level in order to follow the examples of Israel, America and China, closing down sites which pose a …
The past few months have seen several significant moves on the booming China-to-Russia cross-border e-commerce scene. This important market represents roughly one half of international e-retailers’ total sales to Russia, or up to $1.5 billion last year, according to a study by East-West Digital News, but still suffers from product quality and delivery time issues. …
Chinese giants make their move into Russia’s booming cross-border e-commerce scene Read More
Mikhail Petrov, former chief engineer for Vkontakte (VK.com), has written a post about what has been going on in Russia’s leading social network since the departure of its founder Pavel Durov. He stated that Russian intelligence agencies and cellular operators now have full access to users’ personal data. According to Petrov, however, it is not …
As previously reported by Russian Search Marketing, Russian Internet users spend a whopping 40% of their time online on social networking sites. As westerners we are all familiar with Facebook but the site actually is much less popular in Russia than you would expect in part due to its lower level of functionality than the more …
Illustrating the appeal of the kids goods segment, a group of Russian businessmen from the spirits industry have launched Mamagazin.ru, a new e-commerce site with an assortment of more than 5,000 items at start. The site serves all Russian regions via agreements with the Russian post and private carriers, reported business daily Kommersant. The project …
Vkontakte, Russia’s leading social network also known as VK.com, is about to launch a gaming platform for developers of games on mobile devices, Vkontakte representative Georgy Lobushkin told Russian business daily Vedomosti. At present, there are games apps only on the web version of the social network. The platform will be for creators of games …
Vkontakte to launch mobile game development platform Read More
Last week Yandex announced to its Russian users that it will stop supporting its blog hosting service Ya.ru “by the end of this summer.” “About 0.3% of the journals opened on the service are now updated once a month. On average, just 1500 comments are added in a day,” the Russian search giant explained. “Obviously, the …
