RussianSearch.org

Russia's Increasing Internet Connectivity + Mobile Penetration

Elizabeth M. Lloyd, chief marketing officer of Dragon Media Online, reports on Russia on iMediaConnection. I’m not much into link posts (after all there is del.icio.us for these type of things), but this brief article sums up well a lot of the things the author of this blog has been covering in the past months.

Full text: Marketers Look to Russia for New Opps.

Runet Advertising Translates Into Opportunity Growth

IMHO VI, the leading Russian Internet advertising agency, reports record demand for banner and multimedia advertisement this year. IMHO VI has one of the best advertising networks that includes Yandex, Mail.ru, Afisha.ru, Newsru.com, Gazeta.ru and a number of other popular portals on Runet. According to the recent interview with Arsen Revazov, president of IMHO VI, placements for banners on the major portals have a good chance to be completely sold out by early fall this year.

As I mentioned here before, the Internet advertising market in Russia is expected to reach the 100M mark in 2006. With the current growth rate of 80% a year, IMHO VI estimates the market to be at $500M by 2010, which sounds very realistic.

Without a doubt, the growing demand puts pressure on the existing advertisers to improve their products and offerings. It also creates an awful lot of opportunities for the newcomers and the development of a variety of new advertising platforms. In the next year we will see new search players, such as Webalta and Quintura, coming into this market. They will bring along the social media and networks that have just begun to materialize on Runet. It'll be exciting to watch, and even more exhilarating to partake!

Kremlin Wall Bricks for Sale

As a follow-up to Alex Tew’s idea of the Million Dollar Homepage, Ivan Shifrin, a Russian high school kid from St.Petersburg, takes it a step forward by selling bricks of a virtual Kremlin wall.

The money earned will finance Shifrin’s dream business that will build playgrounds and sport facilities in his hometown. Moreover, the bricks will be given away for free to shelters, orphanages, and other socially conscious organizations in need of getting the word out. Advertisers without Web sites will have an option of having a brief page built for them.

I wonder how many more times this ingenuous viral fundraising trick will work, and what organization (as opposed to an individual) will be clever enough to take advantage of it?

16 bricks sold and more than 4,000 to go. Go Ivan!   

Russian Quintura, World’s Hottest Search Startup

In a recent article, Erick Schonfeld from Business 2.0 identified 23 most innovative startups from around the world. Russian experimental search engine Quintura made the list:

In the increasingly crowded search space, Quintura's free downloadable software is winning praise for its commonsense user-centric approach. Type in a search for "Jaguar" and it'll offer up "car" and "cat." It then automatically reorders results based on which you choose. You can also save your searches and come back to them later.

Quintura is an interesting experiment in search that builds on associations. Here is how the company positions itself among search giants:

…We don’t want you to part with your favorite -Yahoo, MSN or Google… But what if you know only your general search scope? Neither the author’s name nor the book title. In a library, the only way out is to ask a librarian. But on the web, what do you do? You are on your own. Until now. Quintura is the very know-all librarian!

Google Executives on Competition in Russia

Since I’m really into pulling quotes on this blog lately, I couldn’t possibly omit these two, which came from Google executives during the July conference call in reply to a question regarding challenges the company is facing in Russian and Chinese markets.

In general we think we are doing really well in the United States and in Europe... in some of those local emerging markets, we have more challenges... I think the equation there is one we are aware of how to solve. We need local engineering talent. We need local product innovation. We are busy trying to staff those operations.
- Omid Kordestani, SVP, Global Sales & Business Development

In Russia, which you know, I'm embarrassed to say we're not number one in, there's a very strong company - Yandex, which has been very talented. They've been doing search since 1990 or something. But primarily, [the issue is that] Russian has some unique language features, which we've been addressing recently. Some of the recent rollouts have really improved our Russian language search quality, and I hope that will help us. We've also recently opened an engineering office in Moscow, and for a short while we've also had a sales office there. I think we're going to really improve in those geographies, and I hope we continue to improve in some of the others where we're not number one as well.
- Sergey Brin, Co-Founder & President, Technology

The quotes come from Google's 2006 Q2 Earnings Conference Call