TECH CRUNCH - Russian search giant Yandex has confirmed the completion of the sale of two of its flagship media properties, News and Zen, to local social media giant, VK, following regulatory approvals. The sale includes the Yandex.ru homepage which will pass to VK - with visitors to that site being redirected to a renamed version of the page, dzen.ru, which is controlled and developed by VK.
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Yandex's Sale of News and Zen to VK Completes
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Yandex's Sale of Media Assets to VK Includes yandex.ru Homepage
TECH CRUNCH - Russian search giant Yandex has finalized the sale of its two flagship media properties to local rival VK, owner of the eponymous social network. The deal to sell the products, Yandex's algorithmically sorted news aggregator (News) and blogging recommender platform (Zen), also includes the sale of the main page, Yandex.ru, which integrates content from News and Zen into the search page. Once the sale completes, visitors browsing Yandex.ru will be redirected to a renamed version of the page, dzen.ru.
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Yandex Signs Deal With VK to Sell Its Media Products, News, and Zen
TECH CRUNCH - In further fallout from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Yandex, referred to as the 'Google of Russia', has signed a term sheet to sell its media division to VK. It has signed a term sheet to divest its news aggregator (News) and blogging/infotainment platform (Zen) with VK. VK as the leading contender is said to acquire Yandex's media assets as the latter looked for an exit from rising risk in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the Kremlin's tightening its grip on freedom of expression.
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Yandex Launches Russian Rival Of Foursquare
THE MOSCOW TIMES - June 19 - Russian search engine Yandex released a new Russia-focused social networking app, Yandex.Gorod, which helps its users find popular venues by providing user reviews.
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Yandex Adds Facebook Posts To Its Search Results
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 14 - Yandex is launching a social search feature that will serve Yandex visitors related, real-time public posts from Facebook alongside other search results. Yandex, which accounts for around 60% of all searches in Russia, will also use Facebook firehose data to help provide more relevant results. The only other search engine that uses Facebook in its results is Bing in the U.S.
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Facebook Blocks Yandex’s New Social Search App
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 25 - Yandex begged Facebook not to shut down its social search app Wonder that launched this morning. Wonder, the voice-activated social search app for iOS, let people see what local businesses friends had visited or taken photos at, what music they’d been listening to, and what news they had been reading. It essentially reorganized Facebook’s data into a much more mobile, discoverable format. Unfortunately, Facebook’s Platform Policy says “You must not include data obtained from us in any search engine or directory without our written permission.” Last week, Facebook blocked voice messaging app Voxer’s access to its Find Friends feature that lets people recreate their Facebook social graph on other apps. It seems that Facebook has matured to the point that it’s willing to trade its status as an “open platform” in exchange for preventing competing apps from stealing its value and users.
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SocialMart: Social Shopping Powered By Yandex
TECH CRUNCH - May 28 - Russian search leader Yandex financed SocialMart, previously knowns as Social Market, back in June 2011. One year later, Yandex says that its Social Market is already the country’s largest comparison shopping service, containing 33M offers from 9.5K online shops. Its monthly audience in March 2012 was ~14.2M. SocialMart is currently available as an app on Facebook and Vkontakte, and for now it only focuses on the Russian market.
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Yandex Is Twitter’s New Real-Time Search Partner
TECH CRUNCH - Feb 21 - Yandex, Russia’s search giant, today announced that it will carry Twitter data in all of its search results. Yandex describes this as a licensing deal. The terms of it were not disclosed but Microsoft reportedly paid Twitter $30M for a similar search agreement. The Yandex agreement is similar to the real-time Twitter search that used to be offered by Google, a partnership that ended last year around the time that Google was launching its own Google+ service.
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Russian Search Giant Yandex Acquires "The Tweeted Times"
TECH CRUNCH - Aug 26 - Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, has acquired startup venture The Tweeted Times, which enables people to create custom online 'newspapers' generated from their Twitter accounts. Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed, but Yandex says it aims to continue offering the social news service and that the entire The Tweeted Times team will be joining the search engine company.
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Yandex Acquires Single Sign-in Plugin Maker Loginza
TECH CRUNCH - Jan 27 – Russian search engine Yandex has acquired local start-up Loginza for and undisclosed amount. Loginza's service enables user authentication via Facebook, Twitter or OpenID-supported sites without additional registration. The company claims its authentication form is implemented on 6,500 sites. Yandex plans to extend the list of supported providers and plugins and to translate Loginza to other languages. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
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Russian Yandex Partners With VKontakte
TECH CRUNCH - Dec 2 - Russian search giant Yandex, that is thought to be considering an IPO for up to $1.5 billion, partners with local Facebook-clone VKontakte, which is the largest social network in Russia. Under the arrangement, the public-facing elements of VKontakte user profiles will show up in Yandex searches in realtime. So far Yandex indexing ~25m user profiles. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH
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Russia Has Most Engaged Social Networking Audience Worldwide
PR NEWSWIRE - Oct 20 - comScore released a study of internet usage in Russia based on August 2010 data from the comScore Media Metrix service. The study revealed that Russians are the heaviest social networkers worldwide in terms of time spent per user and that Yandex is the leading property in the Russian Federation. In Au 2010, 34.5M Russian internet users (74.5% of the online population) visited at least one social network. With an average of 9.8 hours per visitor during the month, Russians spent more than double the worldwide average of 4.5 hours per visitors on social networks, ranking it #1 among all countries in social networking engagement. Israel ranked second with an average of 9.2 hours per visitor, followed by Turkey with 7.6 hours. FULL ARTICLE @ PR NEWSWIRE
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