Runet: 5 Top Russian Websites
Russian internet market is scarcely covered outside of the country but it's not for the lack of news. The main obstacle is language: most online services are oriented towards domestic market and are hence mostly in Russian. Another thing is innovation: there are few companies (if any) that have come out of Russia with truly ground-breaking ideas - most of the services are copies of similar American websites. Nevertheless, the number of internet users is growing together with the size of their pockets. Hence, a number of companies managed to build impressive userbases, make big bucks and dodge the competition from abroad.
According to the latest numbers released by TNS Russia and comScore, the top websites are:
- Yandex with 26 million monthly visits. Yandex is the leading search engine in Russian-speaking internet (Runet) founded in 2000. It can be described as a Russian copy of Google: apart from the search engine it offers a number of other services like maps with street views, job searches, online payments and real-time traffic-jams monitor. It's reach has grown by almost 20% in the last two years encompassing 79% of all Runet users. Yandex's search engine is thriving in Russia: it has 25% more monthly visits than Google. The company recently stroke a deal with Facebook to integrate some of the content from the social network into its search engine.
- Mail.ru with 25 million monthly visits. Mail.ru Group (founded 1998) is the leading Internet portal that offers a webmail service, a social network of its own (MoiMir.ru), a popular search engine and many online games. Mail.ru Group recently filed for a $876 million IPO in London Stock Exchange.
- Vkontakte.ru with 20 million monthly visits. Vkontakte.ru was founded in 2004 and is the most popular Russian social network. It can also be described as an almost direct copy of Facebook. It's reach has grown most dramatically in the past two years from 30% to 73% of Internet users. Interesting to note that the three Russian social networks (Vkontakte.ru, Odnoklassniki.ru and MoiMir.ru) are almost ten times more popular in Russia than Facebook, according to comScore.
- Google Sites with almost 20 million monthly visits. Google is the only foreign web company whose userbase grew in the past two years from 41% to 67% of all Runet users. Other companies like AOL LCC and Microsoft sites dicreased their reach by more than 10% since 2008.
- Odnoklassniki.ru with 16 million users. Odnoklassniki (founded in 2006) is Russia's second-largest social network whose users tend to be slightly older than Vkontakte's. The website's reach has grown by a mere 8% in the past two years, reaching 38% of all Runet users.
Three important trends can be noted from this. First, Russian internet market is very much domestically oriented and language plays an important role. Second, in the past two years Russian web companies have been successfully squeezing out foreign competitiors away from Runet. Thirdly, Russian websites are popular outside Russia: Ukraine, Belarus, Kazahstan and other former USSR states constitute 25 out of 85 million Runet users.
Additionally, e-commerce is growing in Russia. Recent study by Google Russia and Citibank discovered that Russians spent $19,5 billion online this year mostly on travelling, mobile services and music. The figure is estimated to rise up to $26 billion by 2012.
Overall, Russia's online market is fairly large and lucrative with a growing number of users who are increasingly willing to spend some money while browsing the web.
Image by Boris SV
Thanks Anna for covering these, keep writing about Russian stuff, as it is so easy to get alienated from the Russian news. What about for instance RunaCapital, what are they ?
L.