Interview with CEO of Yandex.ru
Interview with CEO of Yandex.ru
Arkady Volozh arrived to conference Czech Internet Forum in Prague. He's CEO of largest Russian search engine Yandex.ru. We talked about internet audience in Russia and the main reasons for success of his company.
Russia is a one of a few countries (with Czech, S. Korea, Japan and China) where Google still doesn't dominate in search market. In Russia it's because of Yandex. For first time Arkady had a talk at the CIF conference in Prague. For me it was one of the best talk at the main conference room along with talks of Ondřej Tomek, Marek Antoš and Patrick Zandl. Arkady showed first homepage of Yandex as it was "only" the search engine. Now it provides services like email, news and also one clever GPS application. The drivers download the application to their smartphones with GPS and then send data about their position to the service. Then the service creates map of traffic jam for all of the users. Here is the actual map of Moscow with traffic density. Arkady was unfortunately wrong when he noticed that this application is very useful in Moscow but probably not so much in Prague, because they have traffic jams every day and we maybe only at Fridays. If he knows...
We could read about Yandex on the Czech web at the Ivo Lukačovič's (founder of Seznam.cz) blog at the article called So I met our company twin, when he described the unbelievable similarities between Yandex and Seznam. Ivo also mysteriously appeared during the talk of Andrey. Check the video at the end of this article :-)
If I catched the numbers properly Yandex's search market consists of 90 % from Russia, 6 - 7 % from Ukraine, then Kazachstan and other countries. Users from Moscow and St. Petersburg are half of the Russian internet population. In the other parts of Russia the DSL technology is still coming and replace the dial-up until now. However internet population in Russia grows 15 - 20 % per year. Yandex's revenues from PPC adverts were 50 % of the whole advertisement's revenues of the last year. This year it will be even more share because of decreasing of the display advertisement.
You can find more information at the video interview with Arkady.
Powerpoint presentation of Arkady's talk is available for download from that conference page.
Information about Yandex in English are available here company.yandex.com
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