Mail.ru Group will master the short genre

The company launches “Russian Twitter”
As Kommersant learned, the Russian Mail.ru Group creates a microblogging service – a competitor to Twitter. Internet users like brevity: in Russia, the audience of traditional Livejournal (“Live Journal”, LJ) increased by 2% over the year to September, and Twitter, which limits authors to 140 characters, grew by 56%.

About what Mail.ru Group is creating its own microblogging service, Kommersant was told by a source in the company itself and managers from two media holdings. According to one of them, the new service will be integrated with other online Mail projects.ru Group: messages in the microblog can be broadcast to the author’s profiles on other sites. The creation of “Russian Twitter” is overseen by the Vice President for Communication Products at Mail.ru Group Anna Artamonova, Kommersant’s interlocutor added.

In the Mail press service.ru Group declined to make official comments.

Internet company Mail.ru Group co-owns casino-royale-online.co.uk the social networks Odnoklassniki (100%), Moi Mir (100%), VKontakte (39.99%), Facebook* (2.33%), instant messaging services ICQ (100%) and Mail.ru Agent", payment service Qiwi (21.35%), game manufacturer Zynga (1.41%), discount service Groupon (4.63%), HeadHunter.ru (97.2%) and others. In the first half of the year, Mail’s revenue.ru Group amounted to $228.2 million, EBITDA — $116.5 million. As of the end of September, 17.7% of voting shares (15.6% of the capital) belonged to the founders, including Yuri Milner, management and employees, 35% (29.1%) – to the South African Naspers, 45% (25.4%) – to New Media and Technology Investment of Alisher Usmanov, 1.4% (7.8%) – to the Chinese Tencent, 0.2% (2.2%) – to the rest, 19.9% – free float on the LSE. Capitalization on Friday: $7.4 billion.

The most popular microblogging service now is the American Twitter, operating since July 2006. Its author can write messages of no more than 140 characters, subscribe to message feeds of other authors, and put links. According to ComScore, Twitter had 157.3 million unique visitors worldwide in September 2011, up 54% from September 2010 (see. table). In Russia, the Twitter audience grew even faster – by 56%, to 3.4 million unique visitors. Microblogging is one of the strongest trends on the Internet, says a manager close to Mail.ru Group.

One of the main owners of Mail.ru Group Alisher Usmanov is also a co-owner of Twitter: the DST Global II fund, in which he participates, is part of the pool of investors who bought 5% of the microblogging service in July 2011 for approximately $400 million. In addition, Mr. Usmanov’s structures, through the company SUP Fabrik, own approximately half of the traditional blogging service Livejournal.com.

Livejournal audience.com in September 2011 there were 11.1 million unique visitors from Russia (30.1 million in the world), ComScore does not disclose the figures for September last year. According to TNS Web Index, the global audience of Livejournal.com last September amounted to 29.1 million unique visitors, over the year it increased by 22.2%, in Russia there were 11.9 million and 2.3%, respectively.

Microblogging service requires Mail.ru Group to expand the product line, as well as increase the involvement of Internet users, notes Troika Dialog analyst Anna Lepetukhina. According to her, the new service will compete “for user time” with Livejournal, but most of all with Twitter. Finam expert Leonid Delitsyn is confident that Mail.ru Group will provide its microblogs with a large audience, but whether they will become prestigious, like Twitter, where Dmitry Medvedev writes, is still a question. Monetizing microblogs will not be easy, even Twitter is still unprofitable, warns Uralsib analyst Konstantin Belov.
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