Today is the 5th Birthday of Yandex Direct, the leading contexual advertising system in Russia (think Adwords). The service was born on 31st July 2001 and powers both the Yandex search engine as well as several other leading Runet sites. With Yandex holding 55% of the Russian market, Yandex Direct is the prominent PPC service in the country.
To celebrate this event Yandex are giving a 20% bonus to all payments made today and tomorrow into the system.
Source: Yandex
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Nick Wilsdon
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It’s been pretty stable at that figure for this year, Yandex managed a coop back in December when they took the contract for Mail.ru (Russia’s Hotmail equivilent with a 5-6% market share) from Google. That gave them wider distribution for their organic results and contextual ads.
Saying that Mail.ru have recently made some moves into search themselves, launching their first engine on the WAP platform here so they may want to push for independance in the future.
Rambler is the main competition here, holding a slight lead still over Google (16%) with 18-20%. They are facing the pressure for second place – it seems it’s not enough to be a portal/search engine anymore – everyone has to push out these applications!
Largely though Yandex is holding the lead well, developing enough applications to hold Google at bay. They have Yandex Wallet (PayPal), Maps, WiFi services and desktop search – all of course tailored to the Russian audience. I imagine their upcoming IPO on the LSE will be quite interesting.
55% market share for a search engine is pretty good. Is that number growing or are they facing increasing competition from the likes of Google and others?