Yandex has just released its financial figures for 2010 and the number one Russian search engine managed to achieve a whopping 43% growth in revenue taking them to $410 million — 88% of this increased revenue related to pure search ads as opposed to the other advertising products offered by the company. And search ads actually grew faster at 45% growth than the other advertising types.
Yandex points out that the Russian Association of Communication Agencies have reported growth for the first three quarters of 2010 of 14% overall and 37% for online — which simply goes to show that Yandex’s growth both partially reflects the development of search advertising within the market, and at the same time demonstrates growth above the average. CEO Arkady Volzh reinforces this point, “The highlight of 2010, as we see it, is that by constantly improving our product quality we managed to increase our share of the search market. The considerable revenue increase we report this year reflects two important trends — a post-crisis revival of the small and medium-sized businesses and a shift in advertising expenditures from other channels towards online advertising.”
The Russian internet statistics organisation LiveInternet says that Yandex’s share of the Russian search market grew by 5.2% to 64.1% in December 2010, with its share in the Ukrainian market going up 6.2% to 27% and its market share in Kazakhstan increasing 4.6 % to 24.4%. ComScore also says that Yandex’s monthly audience grew 64% from November 2009 to November 2010, peaking at over 54 million users in November 2010. During the past year, Yandex added localized services for users in Belarus (yandex.by), released a search engine customised for Ukrainian users, and launched an international search service (yandex.com) alongside a number of vertical market targeted services including Yandex.Realty, Yandex.Jobs, Yandex.Music and Yandex.Amenities. Yandex now has 180,000 advertisers which was itself 40% ahead of the figure in the previous year.
The result is a fabulous one for Yandex, and a blow for Google, and means that Yandex is continuing to maintain and to build on its share of the Russian-language market and they are beginning to show growth in the historically closely-related Slavic eastern Europe.
Andy Atkins-Kruger
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