2007 Is The Year of Social Networks in Russia

Files under: Inside View, News, Tech, Web 2.0
Posted by: Quintura @ 12:04 [16. 12. 07]

Odnoklassniki.ru has become the largest Russian (and, most likely, Eastern European) social networking site with 7 million registered accounts and 2.5 million daily users.

I recently met with Albert Popkov, the founder of Odnoklassniki.ru. His vision for the site is to provide the best online networking experience for classmates from school and university who would like to reunite.

Albert runs a small team of twenty in the Russian capital city Moscow. The site was launched in March 2006 but it was not until spring 2007 when its usage really started picking up. This is when Odnoklassniki.ru received a private equity funding. Some 20% of site users come from abroad and Albert adds that Odnoklassniki.ru is a top 30 site in Germany.

The company behind the site already monetizes its traffic by selling display advertisements. The CPM rate is about $0.5. It is quite low but should be explained that a site user has a lot of page views during its session. Odnoklassniki.ru plans to launch premium services in 2008 and open its platform to selected partners. This is where the real fun for small and individual Russian software developers could begin.

Odnoklassniki.ru did not confirm a recent rumor that the leading Russian search engine and portal Yandex offered to buy out the site and its user data. I believe that Odnoklassniki.ru has yet a lot of room to grow its user base and become the leading destination site in the Russian Internet (or Ru-Net) in the near future.

Please find out more information about Odnoklassniki.ru on Quintura

In the meantime, a Facebook-like social networking site Vkontakte.ru, which has some 4 million registered accounts, announced it became Russia’s 2nd visited destination site according to the Alexa statistics of top sites in Russia. Having 300 million page views per day, Vkontakte.ru would earn $150,000 per day (or $4.5 million per month) should it sold display advertisements.

Mail.ru, which was recently officially valued $1 billion by Naspers, is ranked the 1st site and Odnoklassniki.ru – 4th one.

2007 is definitely the Year of Social Networks in Russia. They really became mainstream..

See the Alexa chart below for the leading Russian social networks.

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