Russian Internet Giants

18. 03. 2016 Autor Petr Vojtěchovský

As you probably know, Yandex is the most visited website in all Russia. Part of the Yandex company are 31 services, among the most popular ones are the Yandex search engine, e-mail and online marketing tools (Yandex Metrica, Yandex Direct, etc.). But Russia is not just about Yandex. Social network VKontakte is a very popular variation on Facebook. Mail.ru, Google.ru, YouTube and Odnoklassniki are also widely spread in Russia.

Even though Facebook is among the 15 most visited websites in Russia, its figures (visitors per day, average time spent on a website) are far beyond its local competition (VKontakte and Odnoklassniki):

• VKontakte is daily visited by 24,2 million users that spend there around 39 minutes on average.
• 16,3 internet million users spend daily 32 minutes on Odnoklassniki
• In Russia, Facebook has only 3,7 million active users that spend there only around 5 minutes a day.

Anyway, we must take this dataset only as a representative sample, because the statistics from mobile apps are not included.

Local players

Yandex

Yandex is a Russian internet company that owns the biggest Russian search engine with market share over 60 % and other successful internet products and services. Yandex is considered to be the fourth biggest search engine in the world. According to the information from comScore.com it takes care of 150 million search requests daily created by more than 51 million of its visitors (data from 2013). The Yandex homepage (Yandex.ru) is year after year the most visited Russian website. Except for Russia, Yandex is very popular (second most popular) in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus. Quite surprisingly, it is also used in Turkey and moreover, Yandex is planning to open a new innovation and development centre in Berlin.

VK (VKontakte)

VK is the biggest Russian social network that has a very similar design and functions to facebook, some even call it the Russian Facebook. VK was created in year 2006. According to the server Alexa.com it is the most visited social network in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldavia and Kazakhstan. Moreover, it is the second most visited website in all Russia and twenty-second most popular website in the world. Originally VK was created to serve the teenagers, however thanks to its user friendliness it quickly gained more and more supporters from the older generations. Since 2014 VK has been solely over the control of Mail.ru Group

Mail.ru Group

Mail.ru Group is one of the biggest internet companies in Russia. Interestingly it originated as a free e-mail service, but today it is recognized as a key Russian company with capital and turnovers of billions of dollars, owning also very successful projects in many different fields, such as socializing, communication or entertainment.

Website comScore.com conducted a research in year 2013, proving that websites owned by Mail.ru combined are visited by 86 % of Russian internet users every month. Based on the number of visited websites, Mail.ru is in the worlds TOP 5 internet companies. It is important to realize, that it controls 3 biggest Russian social networks – VKontakte, Odnoklasssniki and Moy Mir.

Odnoklassniki.ru

It is a platform for meeting people from specific schools and classes. People are sorted in groups based on the class they belong to. Its popularity is constantly rising.

Rambler

Rambler.ru used to be the biggest Russian search engine, however it lost its position after the rise of Yandex. Rambler lost its market share mostly due to the fact that it was not innovative enough. Nowadays Rambler has in its portfolio standard search engine, email, news, horoscopes, dating service, financial portal, and portal with realities. It is quite similar to the Czech search engine Seznam.cz and its portfolio of services.

Avito

Avito is the biggest Russian network for various advertisers, founded by two Swedish entrepreneurs.