Odnoklassniki.ru has 15 million registered accounts and 5 million daily users. The social network is now growing by 100 thousand new accounts per day, mostly registered by new users from Russian regions. The site’s name is translated into English as “Classmates”. The site is sort of a blend between Classmates.com and Hot or Not. The company currently uses 140 computer servers for its service. It sells 728 x 90 top banners and 240 x 400 side banners at CPM rates of $0.7 - 1.7.

Odnoklassniki.ru was ranked the 7th online property in Russia with reach of 30% of the Russian internet audience in a recent comScore study.

In contrast, the 2nd largest Russian social networking site Vkontakte.ru, which is similar to Facebook and has over 10 million registered accounts, does not sell online advertising. The site recently started generating revenues from online recruitment services.

The recent drop in a number of active blogs in Russia can be explained by a growing popularity of online social networks.

The leading Russian web company Yandex is rumored to do IPO on NASDAQ at a multi-billion valuation in 2008. The other Western IPO candidates include the IT services and system integration companies IBS Group and Verysell, virtualization software vendor Parallels, security software company Kaspersky Lab, and accounting and multimedia software vendor 1C Company. Russia is going to become the second largest Internet population in Europe by the end of 2008 while the Russian internet advertising market is expected to increase to $0.7 billion in 2008.

While Silicon Valley may be ignoring the rest of the world in light of potential economic recession, the Russian media companies have started expanding abroad. The Russian group Finam bought a stake in Badoo social network in the U.K., mobile entertainment provider Playfon acquired mobile community Wappy.to from Denmark, and A1 Group acquired AFM Cinemas in Turkey.

The Russian President Vladimir Putin, Time’s 2007 Person of the Year named Dmitry Medvedev his successor last year.

Dmitry Medvedev has been the first deputy prime minister of Russia for the past two years. He is 42 years old from St. Petersburg. Dmitry has legal background. He is a regular Internet user.

In his interview to Business Week in December 2007, Dmitry Medvedev said: “I want to preserve [Putin’s] course, simply because it has shown that it can work. Our citizens have begun to live better. Living standards are rising. The most important social problems are being solved. Not as fast as we’d like, but it’s happening. I think that continuing on the path of modern, stable development over several decades will turn Russia into one of the most developed countries in the world. Today we’re already one of the 10 largest economies. The macroeconomic situation isn’t bad. But it’s obvious that there’s a lot left to do.”

Here is a picture of Dimitry Medvdev (left) talking to Vladimir Putin (right).

Learn more about Dimtry Medvedev via Quintura.com

DTV reported revenues of $40 million and operating profit of $4 million in 2007. DTV had 2.5 percent share of Russian viewers aged 6-54 in the fourth quarter of 2007.

MTG first acquired 75 percent of DTV in May 2001. MTG is the largest shareholder of CTC Media and owns 39.5 percent of its shares. CTC Media completed initial public offering on NASDAQ in June 2006.

CTC Media recently agreed to acquire 60 percent of the economic interest in Channel 31 Group, the 4th largest TV broadcaster in Kazakhstan for $65 million.

In 2006-07, several entertainment TV channels in Russia have been bought out in multi-hundred million dollar transactions. Prof-Media acquired acquired TV3 for $550 million and MTV Russia for $360 million. Metalloinvest purchased 75 percent of MUZ-TV valuing it at some $400 million.

Being a strong supporter of software entrepreneurs from Russia, Scott Maxwell supervised Insight’s investments in storage management software vendor Acronis and virtualization software vendor Parallels (formerly SWSoft), both from Russia. His primary focus is investing in and building software companies from the expansion stage.

Scott stroke his first Russian gold when Insight’s portfolio investment Aelita Software was acquired by Quest Software for $115 million in 2004.

Back in 2005, Scott Maxwell connected me with the Aelita founders Andrey Baronov and Ratmir Timashev (ABRT) who then became the first outside investors in Quintura. In early 2006, Scott joined a seed funding round in Quintura and since then provided valuable advice to the company’s management.

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb recently raised an issue of ‘Brand’ Squatting on his blog.

And now it looks like TechCrunch.ru uses a TechCrunch visual identity and publishes the Russian translations of articles from TechCrunch without any permission.

According to RU-Center, Techcrunch.ru is registered by a Russian who used to blog about web services on the other blog. Starting from January 25, he translates articles from TechCrunch into Russian and publishes them on TechCrunch.ru.

What will Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and the others do next to go about this kind of an issue?

PS

The Russian web users do have an original source of information about new web services. The most popular blog that covers this topic is Internetno.net. Its editors produce original content about web technologies and startups in both Russia and abroad. The site has seven thousand RSS subscribers and over three thousand daily unique visitors.

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.

1. Do you build your own index or do you use another index? How important is that distinction?

We at Quintura do build our own web index. As compared to a traditional web index, the Quintura web index is based on contextual relationships between words and phrases. We believe that any search engine has to have its own web index in order to create a substantial shareholder value and make it sustainable.

See the other results on Another Great Debate: Tab search vs. Tag search

Charles Knight, editor of AltSearchEngines, explains: “[Last] Saturday Quintura began their new ad campaign “We are not afraid of Google!” Now that may just be bravado, and I’m sure that all 10 finalists would say that they are not afraid of Google, either, but only Quintura has made it an explicit corporate slogan!…

… Quintura’s accomplishments are well documented on this and many other blogs and media outlets, and now they have injected a little emotion into the mix. That’s Alternative Search Engine pride, and that’s what resonates most with me. It’s not the only reason they were chosen, obviously, but it was just enough to tip the needle!”

Update: Quintura joined a debate - Tag search vs. Tab search on AltSearchEngines.com the next day after the announcement of the award where you could read some insights why Quintura is the winner.

Here is a list of ten finalists from AltSearchEngines.com:

1. Quintura

2. Answers.com

3. Exalead

4. Omgili

5. KoolTorch

6. GoshMe

7. AfterVote

8. KartOO

9. Dialogus

10. Onkosh

Please leave your comment regarding the award on AltSearchEngines.

Disclosure: I am President & CEO of Quintura.

However, it’s a huge success for Dima who made a big step to be a European pop star. Here is a tip: enter Dima Bilan in the query field at http://search.quintura.ru to get a snapshot of related words and then digg for more.