The move to a shorter and simpler .com domain is associated with Vkontakte's efforts to expand their global reach. As Ilja Perekopskij, Vice-President of Vkontakte, told Forbes, international expansion (starting from Europe) is one of the company's key strategic goals for 2011. Vk.com is shorter, simpler and easier to remember for foreigners claimed Pavel Durov, founder and CEO. Vkontakte's revenue and user metrics are looking really good so far. According to Ilja Perekopskij, in 2010 the company's turnover was $98.3M, $44.76 of which came from advertising. Now their monthly revenue is $8-9M, 60% of which comes from advertising, 30% from applications and 10% from other services. By the end of the year Vkontakte plans to increase their revenue by 70%-100% compared to last year.

User penetration has been doubling every year so far. According to Gazeta.ru, in January 2011 Vkontakte attracted 23.1M unique visitors. In May 2011, according to Ilja Perekopskij, the website was attracting 26M unique visits daily.

Vkontakte's userbase in Russia is growing proportionately to Internet penetration. While Moscow and St.Petersburg are one of the main hubs, they only account for 20-25% of all active users. About 60% of all users are older than 25. Outside of Russia, Vkontakte is also the most popular website in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

While Vkontakte's main revenue comes from ads, this year they radically changed their approached by discontinuing banner ads. 'Now our model of monetization consists of only two things: targeted advertising and apps', notes Ilja.

When asked about plans for acquisition or IPO, Ilja answered negatively. 'We get acquisition offers from Russian and foreign investors all the time. We are not thinking about going public either. We are building a company where we want to work not one or two years but a decade. The only reason we earlier raised funding from Mail.ru was to develop our infrastructure. Now we have enough funds to continue growing at our own expense', comments Ilja.

While Vkontakte's success in Russia and Russian-speaking markets in the CIS is undeniable, expanding to Europe and globally is a mighty task. If a country market is not already dominated by Facebook, it would be occupied by some local social network like VZ in Germany or Nasza Klasa in Poland.

Though the website itself has been translated into almost 100 languages, most of the content on Vkontakte is still in Russian. While there are a lot of Russian-speaking expats in Europe, it is the rest of the population that Vkontakte needs to attract to gain real growth in those countries. How this is to be achieved remains to be seen.

That said, Vkontakte does have some features that other social networks lack like unlimited audio and video streaming. But since most of the uploaded content is of dubious origin (in other words pirated), the company might eventually run into copyrights dispute, which would undermine this feature.