Yandex has secured a contract with the company behind LiveJournal in Russia to display their contextual adverts on users blogs.
LiveJournal is very popular in Russia with almost 1m blogs currently hosted on the system and a reported 3.3m visitors per month (compared to 6m visitors/month for the entire LiveJournal Network). Although the LiveJournal brand is owned by US firm SixApart, they licensed the management of the Russian sector to “Суп” (Soup) in 2006.
Revenues from the advertising will not go to blog owners but be divided between “Soup” and Yandex. The agreement is in place until Livejournal.ru earns their first $1m. Interestingly Yandex has to date excluded blogs from signing up to their contextual advertising program, Yandex Direct.
This move will also extend Yandex’s contextual advertising to a wider audience, outside Russia. Figures generated by Soup show that while 81.4% of their users come from Russia, there are sizable user groups from Ukraine (9.6%), Belarus (3.2%), Estonia (1.4%) and Latvia (1.3%).
Nick Wilsdon
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