VC.ru (formerly Zuckerberg will call)

Owners

Since April 17, 2014, the Zuckerberg Call and TJournal projects have been merged into one publishing house called the Committee. Unification is a natural step for projects with a common investor. The co-owner of both publications is the same fund - Vaizra Capital, which invested in them by decision of the co-founder and former co-owner of VKontakte Lev Leviyev.

Performance indicators

According to the resource, the site's revenue in 2013 amounted to 3 million rubles, net profit of more than 500 thousand. The attendance of the resource, according to the publication itself as of July 2015, is 650 thousand visitors per month.

In April 2016, the Yury Sinodov cited the following figures:

Total loss of Vc.ru and TJournal in 2014 - 14 million rubles. Expenses for two - like ten Roems (well, almost).

In September 2015, the editor-in-chief of the publication, Konstantin Panfilov, cited figures for visits: over the year, the audience of the publication almost tripled - from 570 thousand to 1.7 million unique visitors per month.

History

Rates for paid articles

As of June 2022, the following prices for the preparation and placement of advertising articles have been published on the publication's website:

Urgent texts

• 150,000 rubles
• 440,000 rubles (10 thousand unique views).

Native texts

• 180,000 rubles
• 480,000 rubles (10 thousand unique views).

Texts with heroes

• 230,000 rubles
• 530,000 rubles (10 thousand unique views).

Product texts

• 260,000 rubles
• 560,000 rubles (10 thousand unique views).

2015

Rename to VC.ru

In September 2015, a rebranding was carried out: the publication abandoned the usual name and old domain in favor of VC.ru (виси.ру). At the same time, an expansion of the profile was announced - from now on, notes related to the business in general, and not just the IT sphere, will appear on the site.

Getting into the registry of prohibited sites

On July 28, 2015, it became known that Roskomnadzor had entered the Zuckerberg will call resource into the register of banned sites because of an article on bitcoin.

"On

July 28, Roskomnadzor sent a notification to the editorial office of" CPU "about the inclusion of the site in the Unified Register of Prohibited Sites in Russia," according to the resource itself^[1].

It indicates that the reason was an article on bitcoin from 2013, which describes the principles of cryptocurrency.

The report notes that the decision to recognize this article as information prohibited for distribution in Russia was made by the Narimanov court of the Astrakhan region in February 2015. The plaintiff, the deputy prosecutor of the Narimanovsky district, insisted that the article contains information about the legalization of proceeds from crime.

"After

receiving a warning within three days, the site administration must edit the material, removing controversial materials from it, or completely block access to the text," the message says.

The publication does not say whether the site administration will follow the order of Roskomnadzor.

Later, the court explained which part of the article caused the ban. Two days later, the editors removed one sentence from the article, after which the site was removed from the register.

2014: Teaming with TJournal Editorial

Since April 17, 2014, the Zuckerberg Call and TJournal projects have been merged into one publishing house called the Committee.

The co-owner of both publications is the same fund - Vaizra Capital, which invested in us by decision of the co-founder and former co-owner of VKontakte Lev Leviyev.

A few months ago, Zuckerberg will call and TJournal, having exceeded 5.5 million views per month, have already joined forces in selling ads, now they have decided to exchange technologies and optimize duplicate workflows.

"Zuckerberg Will Call" concentrates on news coverage about internet business, startups and marketing. The editors will return to their origins and will pay more attention to Russian projects: news, interviews, reviews and opinions. In addition to editorial content, a community of entrepreneurs and specialists will develop on the site - the first step towards this was the appearance of profiles indicating the place of work and verified badges in the comments.

TJournal will continue to experiment in the development of technologies for information aggregation. In the next iteration, the project will have a full-fledged application for iOS 7 and a section in which the readers themselves will create content. The TJ editors will narrow the list of topics covered to a number understandable to readers and advertisers, while delving into the development of formats for news coverage around social networks, blogs, legislation, gadgets and other phenomena related to Internet users.

The former press secretary of VKontakte Vladislav Tsyplukhin will be engaged in the development of the platform of both projects - he now works in our team as product director. Together with technical director Ilya Chekalsky, they will continue to create a platform on the basis of which the company plans to open other niche media.

Andrey Zagoruiko (also known as Sasha Peganov) will be engaged in monetizing projects, building sales departments and special projects. His team will have to study project audiences, interact with advertisers and develop formats that will allow us to live and develop.

The editor-in-chief of Zuckerberg will call - Konstantin Panfilov. Philip Kontsarenko was appointed chief editor of the publication.

The editor-in-chief of TJournal is Nikita Likhachev. Chief Editor - Sultan Suleimanov.

We have different projects, but now we are one team.

2012

Due to pressure from Facebook, the publication changes the domain to siliconrus.com

The growing popularity of the publication, a reference to the name of Mark Zuckerberg and the provocative address of the site - facebookru.com - attracted the attention of Facebook lawyers. In April 2012, they sent a demand to the editorial office to stop using the social network trademark in the name. As a result, "Zuckerberg will call" was forced to change the address of the site to siliconrus.com, but at the same time left the usual name for the publication.

Alexander Peganov received the ROTOR-2012 Award as "Editor of the Year." Zuckerberg himself received the award, entering the top three sites on information technology and telecommunications. He shared the prizes with Roem.ru and 3DNews.

Leviyev fails to buy Sinodov's stake in Roy LLC and buys Zuckerberg will call

In April 2016, Yury Sinodov told the details of the negotiations with Lev Leviyev:

In

late 2011 - early 2012, Lev Leviyev, then co-owner of VKontakte, had a conversation with me about whether I could sell my stake in Roy LLC. Offered about 10 million rubles.

At the same time, he did not demand that I continue to work on the project. As I later learned, they were already looking for a person for the role of editor-in-chief, proposals were made to a person known in IT journalism. (In 2016, he is better known in IT PR).

The

rest of Roy's shareholders had the right to such proposals "first night," they reacted negatively to the situation. No one understood what Leviyev wants from the project and what he wants to do on it. They made me a counter-offer, which suited me, Roy went his own way, and Leviyev his own.

"Zuckerberg will call" at that time existed mainly in the form of a Facebook group, Andrei Zagoruiko (Sasha Peganov) had some kind of conceptual relationship with Igor Matsanyuk, sat in his office, attendance compared to Roem.ru he had ten times less, but the project was cheerful and discussed in the "party." An obvious candidate to "talk" and maybe buy.

They talked to him. In March-May 2012, judging by the content of the Vc.ru in relation to VKontakte, agreements were reached with Andrei Zagoruiko, in June the company Social Silicone LLC was organized, where at first the founders were:

• Andrey Zagoruiko (40%)
• Cyprus offshore Leviyeva (30%)
• Alexander Veremeev (30%) is a non-public person whom Nikita Likhachev called the designer. This designer was also the gender in TJournal. Durov later suggested that Vlad Tsyplukhin had a stake in Zuckerberg will call, it is possible that Veremeev was Vlad's representative.

(For 2016, everything is recorded on the Cyprus offshore - Zagoruiko left the project)

From

that moment, traffic began to be poured from VKontakte to the Silicone group. Here I will have to quote one of my private letters, which explains why this is important, although every year less and less (the letter was written in mid-2015).

You don't understand. It's not about the absolute numbers of the number of subscribers they receive on VKontakte (which, compared to their current audience, seem insignificant). For more than 3 years, they received about 450 thousand subscribers, but the value is not in these figures by themselves (450 thousand is relatively inexpensive), but in the fact that they went through a wide network throughout VKontakte and grabbed from it only those who are interested in the topic they need. This is not MDK, where today the dude is all funny, and tomorrow he has a wife, two children and he thinks more about where to buy a stroller not very expensive and how to get to the supermarket for pamers. These are people interested in a certain subject area, they gather very expensive, very long and very hard. No one, no Habr, no Cnews, no Roem.ru (well, we understand, we are niche. But the rest?) Did not collect such audience volumes in three years, this is impossible without heating from the outside.

At the same time, the professional field is one of the most rarely changing interests of a person, so getting a user now, they get it almost forever. When the VK stops giving a new audience, it will be possible to do anything with the available, without even paying attention to the Mail.ru and his wishes (now, it seems, they pay attention to their wishes). These people not only sign up, but also go to the site and start reading it. In fact, the whole country, gradually, over several years learned that there is such a site. In this situation, what could we do? They didn't die - already good.

In

a normal situation in a news topic, starting with a certain number of subscribers, the outflow balances the inflow, you stop growing. This is about 200 thousand plus or minus users.

At the same time, traffic from VK helps to attract both traffic from Facebook and from Google: all these systems take into account behavioral factors. What do they see? Oh, here is some kind of site, a lot of people come to it, probably their acquaintances need to show it in higher search (Google), and on Facebook in News Feed, too, everything should be a priority - people just won't go to some site, they are interested. There is a positive feedback - more traffic is given by one source, more traffic is given by other sources.

At the same time, no one except VKontakte provides such a steady increase in audience. Although they had attempts to work with other sources of constant audience. For several months, the CPU tried to work with Rambler for traffic - in nature, every month on the 25th there was a "good article about Rambler." Zhenya Trifonov repeatedly watched the same main Rambler from time to time with heroic efforts, since there was nothing good to write about Rambler. It looked funny, but the conclusion is simple: other channels of attracting a regular audience worked much worse than VC

. (Here I

am usually reproached for being "just jealous." Here we are not talking about envy, but about the fact that it is important for me to understand and know how life works - now this is generally what I earn on bread as part of consulting on Sinodov.com. Take it as a story, not a hit, seriously. I don't like any of those involved in CPTJ, but I understand that no one should share my sympathies and antipathies)

Almost immediately, Vc.ru began to praise VKontakte in all ways, which at first no one understood at all - VK since the founding of Zuckerberg will call was a whipping boy for Peganov. At the beginning of 2013, it became clear that we were not talking about any accidents, that traffic was purposefully pouring on Siliconrus VK. I still do not know why and who inside the VK needed it. There are no questions for the owners of CPTZ, of course.

2010: Zagoruiko begins to blog "Zuckerberg will call"

"Zuckerberg will call" grew out of the personal blog "about failures in SMM," which at the end of 2010 was started by Andrei Zagoruiko, who for a long time hid his real name under the pseudonym Sasha Peganov. Expanding over time the number of topics and the number of materials published daily, Zuckerberg will call has become one of the most popular Russian thematic media.

Notes