The race is on to see which engine will deliver a contextual advertising program for ordinary webmasters in Russia to rival Google.
Well it was only this Tuesday when I wrote that, and it seems that race has started in ernest today.
Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia, have just announced that the barrier to entry into their contexual adverting system will be lowered to allow ordinary webmasters to participate. Previously only web sites that had traffic in the hundred thousand visitors mark could display Yandex Direct advertising, that condition has now been cut to 300 visitors per day. Applicants are no longer required to have a legal company in Russia.
This will no doubt put pressure on site owners to move away from Google’s Adsense program, as to date that has been the only substantial advertising program available in Russia. Yandex has also broken from search engine protocol by announcing they will give partners 50% cut of advertiser payments. The exact cut between publisher and search engine is not disclosed by Google, Yahoo! and MSN although PPC expert, Jennifer Slegg has reported Google to be paying out as high as 78%.
Advertisers are free to chose if they wish to advertise on Yandex’s extended network, excluding all or sites individually by name.
In the summer of 2006 the weekly circulation of funds in the Yandex Direct system exceeded US$ 1m.
Nick Wilsdon
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Hi Comply,
Basically Yandex is the market leader at the moment, with about 65% coverage. Their in-house system also provide contexual advertising to Mail.ru and Nigma.
The other big player is Begun.ru. They aren’t a search engine themselves, more similar to Overture of old. They provide the contexual advertising to Rambler (No.2 – around 20% marketshare) and their network of leading runet sites (including aport and travel.ru etc.)
Google holds about 17-19% market share at the moment here.
You can find statistics on usage here at LiveInternet. Feel free to contact me if you need further help on this.
thanks, that’s what i was looking for. it is already of great help, but any idea where can i find some actual numbers/percentages?
I have a quick question. what is the state of russian context advertising at the moment in terms of market shares? Particulalry in relation to Google, Yandex direct, Begun? I’d really appreciate some rough outline or a link to a decent source.
thanks.
Can anyone figure out why they have so many restrictions? Are they trying to protect the quality of clicks to advertisers? If so – is a blanket restriction (eg blogs) wise?
>they don’t have horizontal and square ads
That’s a good point. Google has realised that choice is a good thing for webmasters and seem to roll out more options fairly regularly. Hopefully Yandex will follow suite on that one.
BTW – good to have you here from SearchEngines.ru.
Yandex doesn’t understand, that websites are not Yandex SERP, so, they don’t have horizontal and square ads. With such an approach I will not move to them in any way. On the moment you start to tell to the Yandex representative, that they should implement horizontal ads, he says: Yandex.Direct is auction. The more you pay, the higher you’re, there cannot be any horizontal or square, only vertical! So, I think it will take one year more to get it into the mind and implement all kinds of ads in order webmasters could put the ads into THEIR OWN design. Good luck to them…
Thanks for the input Itman – wow that’s a pretty exhaustive list! Seems the barrier to entry isn’t quite as low as I first thought on hearing this news.
Yes I am very surprised they aren’t including dating sites, that’s a prized area for PPC.
Interesting Itman – are there any other site exclusions aside from blogs? That is kind of strange considering so many sites these days can be considered ‘blogs’ (do they exclude forums for example?). I also know several designers who almost exclusively use WordPress as the CMS for their client work – holding both blog content and ‘pages’. That doesn’t seem a very sustainable policy but I can understand they are wary of recreating the spam Google seems to have fueled with Adsense.