VKontakte

Internet audience

2020: In the top 50 largest Internet sites in the world

Performance indicators

2020: Revenue growth by 14.9% - up to 25.4 billion rubles

VKontakte, as part of the financial statements of the Mail.ru Group on March 4, 2021, presented the results of its activities for 2020. The company's revenue for the year, despite the pandemic, increased by 14.9% - to 25.4 billion rubles.

According to Mediascope, in December 2020, the number of VKontakte users in Russia increased by 4.5% year-on-year to 73.4 million, and the daily audience increased by 2.2% year-on-year. At the same time, the growth of Runet was 0.8% for the monthly and 1.1% for the daily audience.

As reported, 47.7% of Russian Internet users visit VKontakte every day, while monthly penetration into the Runet audience increased from 74.3% in December 2019 to 77.1% in December 2020.

Over the year, the number of active mini-applications increased from 14 to 25 thousand. The monthly active audience for the year increased by 67% and in December 2020 exceeded 39 million people. For 2020, the number of gadgets that attract more than a million users a month has grown from 12 in January to 30 in December. In 2020, more than 2 million people made trips through the VKontakte Taxi service, and the VKontakte Food mini-application generates more than 3% of Delivery Club orders after restarting in July and attracts 10% of customers.

Already over 17 million people log in to Mail.ru Group services using a single VK Connect account (not counting vk.com authorization). Moreover, on average, since June 2020, the moment of launch, this number has grown by 70% every month. Thanks to VK Connect, users do not need to remember dozens of passwords and it is easier to manage data in different applications and sites. In addition to VKontakte, VK Connect has already fully or partially implemented 12 products: Delivery Club, Citymobil, Neighborhood Kitchen, Marusya voice assistant, Atom browser, Odnoklassniki, VK Combo, Curious, Worki, Yula, BOOM, Mail Mail.ru. Soon a single account will appear in other Mail.ru Group projects, and in the future it is planned to connect to VK Connect and external partners.

In December 2020, the number of daily video views reached 900 million. At the same time, the clips of VKontakte - in December 2020, they collected 230 million views per day. In just six months, the clips collected almost 31 billion views - 75.6 million people watched them, while as of March 2021, 16 million people include videos every day.

Users love to shoot clips: for six months, 1.1 million authors published in the 3.5 million video section.

In the 5 months since its launch, thanks to VK Donut, content creators have earned more than 25 million rubles. The number of paying subscribers is growing by 30% every month.

The total number of messages exchanged daily by users in instant messengers increased by 50% compared to 2019 - to 15 billion in December. The most popular type of attachments in the VKontakte messenger remain voice messages. 33 million people exchange them a month. The number of voice messages sent in December grew by 10% year-on-year.

The audience of mobile games has grown 2 times, and the catalog - 3 times. The average session duration increased to 20 minutes. The total volume of payments in mobile games using the local VKontakte currency also increased 2.5 times.

As a result of the updates, the number of active communities in December grew by 23% year-on-year. The number of active VKontakte advertisers increased by 30%. A simplified site builder has appeared in communities, thanks to which you can land in a few clicks. Since the launch of the function, users have created more than 300 thousand sites. You can also now advise friends of your favorite brands or content creators using the "Recommend" button. During the month, 1.5 million communities received at least one recommendation (~ 400 thousand of them are small and medium-sized enterprises), and in total users leave ~ 200 thousand recommendations every day.

A VKontakte partner program is growing, which allows administrators to receive money for users viewing advertising recordings in their communities and news feed. More than 10 thousand content creators have already joined the program, the most successful of them earn about 1 million rubles. per month. As of December 31, 2020, the number of VK Pay users already exceeded 16 million people.

History

2024: Opening of headquarters in Singer House after renewal

The VKontakte headquarters in the Singer House on Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg opens after an update that was carried out in 2023. Thanks to renovation and the opening of new spaces, the office area grew by almost a third, and the number of jobs increased by 20%. The company announced this on February 9, 2024.

The main philosophy of renovation is the expansion and modernization of the office space with an emphasis on the manufacturability and preservation of the historical heritage of the building. As part of the renovation, new workplaces and recreation areas were opened, infrastructure was improved, furniture and equipment were updated. To increase the comfort of employees in the office, noise cancellation systems, ergonomic workspaces, hot desks, noise-insulating spaces for phone calls, negotiation and soft zones appeared.

The company retained the historical appearance of all important premises for the Singer House, including the dome. Graphics with city attractions and other company offices appeared on the walls of the premises - this allows you to emphasize the historical importance of St. Petersburg as the homeland of VKontakte.

Шаблон:Quote 'author = said Julia Brook, HR Director of VKontakte.

Pridex became the general designer who carried out the complex of construction and engineering work at headquarters.

2023

Introduction of a neural network that will protect against unfriendly comments

The neural network will protect VKontakte users from unfriendly comments. The company announced this on August 24, 2023.

Special machine learning algorithms will identify unfriendly comments with expletives or insults and hide them under a special ram in a separate block. The user will be able to independently choose whether to read these materials. The launch became part of VKontakte's strategy to provide a comfortable digital space and create a trusting environment.

The VKontakte team has developed a neural network that is able to automatically recognize curses, insults and other negative statements in the comments and hide them in a separate block. If desired, the user can expand the filtered comments. The function will become available to users gradually. The initiative was a continuation of the VKontakte strategy to create a comfortable digital environment for users.

Шаблон:Quote 'author = said Ivan Korneev, director of moderation policy and interaction with VKontakte users.

Earlier, administrators of VKontakte communities were able to hide comments containing hostile statements. Also, the social network presented a special mode "Personal Space," which allows you to protect yourself from unwanted attention. In addition, users have access to warnings about suspicious interlocutors in the VK Messenger, as well as a filter of obscene expressions.

Availability of tools for creating and publishing photos and posts

VKontakte presented on August 3, 2023 updates to the photo editor, photo section and post editor. Users will have access to tools that will help them edit and publish photo content faster and easier. Among them: a wide range of filters and proportions for cropping the frame, the ability to upload pictures without albums and choose between a carousel and a grid when publishing a photo.

Photo Editor Update

More filters have appeared in the photo editor: they allow you to increase contrast and make colors brighter or softer. You can also select the filter intensity. More proportions for cropping the frame have become available to the authors, the ability to move the cropping area and rotate it by any number of degrees. The design of the photo editor has also been updated to make it more convenient for authors to choose the necessary tools. The photo editor is available to users when they share pictures in recordings and add photos to albums.

New features for uploading photos

Important photos can be pinned in the "Photos" section so that they are always visible in the profile. Pictures can be uploaded directly to the photo stream, without being added to the album or placed on the wall. It is also possible to move individual pictures to the archive and hide them, and then at any time return them to the "Photos" tab or to any of the albums. You can now edit albums and change their privacy settings from mobile devices.

Updated interface for creating posts

The post editor received an updated design with a focus on fast content publishing. All advanced settings are placed on a separate screen and make it easier to create content. When uploading photos and videos in an updated editor, two publishing formats will be available: grid and carousel. This will allow content authors to make a choice - alternate formats or dwell on the option they like.

Updates to the photo section, photo editor and post editor will gradually become available to all users.

Earlier, VKontakte presented the Knowledge Base for authors with all information about tools for creating, promoting and monetizing content. With its help, it will be easier for novice creators to navigate the capabilities of the social network, and for experienced ones to find information about various tools.

Changes in the social network management structure

From July 3, 2023, the management of the VKontakte social network will be carried out by a collegial body - the Management Team, which will include representatives of the VK top management and VKontakte management. This was reported to TAdviser on July 3, 2023 by representatives of VK. According to them, the management team will be responsible for operational processes, strategic decision-making and the development of new areas of the social network.

In turn, the general director of VKontakte Marina Krasnova and vice president for technology and development of VK, technical director of VKontakte Alexander Tobol decided to leave the company and take up their own project. Read more here.

Start of system transition Int64

On June 29, 2023, VKontakte announced the transition to another infrastructure for storing identifier values: this will ensure uninterrupted operation of services for a growing number of users.

Every day VKontakte is growing in the number of users, communities, games, chat bots, gadgets and other services. To ensure their stable operation, the social network has begun preparations in advance for the transition to a Int64 system for storing user identifiers and other necessary values. VKontakte warned developers of mini-applications and other external services about the necessary technical updates in 2023 and provided instructions to ensure the uninterrupted transition of projects to this infrastructure.

The implementation of the update will take place within a few months - until December 2023. This approach will allow VKontakte to maintain the high speed of services at a significant rate of audience growth and at the same time provide third-party developers with the necessary time to optimize projects.

Our main goal is to provide user comfort when interacting with services created by VKontakte and third-party developers. Preparing the transition to Int64 required a lot of work from our technical team. The update will remove restrictions on the further scaling of VKontakte projects and avoid in the future the potential achievement of limits on the creation of new accounts, communities, chat bots, games and other platform capabilities, said Alexander Tobol, vice president of technology and development at VK, CTO VKontakte.

As part of its development strategy, as an open platform for developers, VKontakte actively supports the creation of its own and external services. In the first quarter of 2023, the average monthly audience of VKontakte in Russia increased by 11% compared to the same period in 2022 - to 81.5 million users, and the active monthly audience of the VK Mini Apps platform increased by 4% - to 43.3 million people. The number of mobile games in the VKontakte catalog in the first quarter of 2023 increased by 98% compared to the first quarter of 2022, and revenue from in-game purchases on mobile devices increased by 75%. The infrastructure upgrade will expand the company's technical capabilities to create and integrate new projects with a growing number of users.

The Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation buys VK bonds for 60 billion rubles from the funds of the NWF

The Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation in April 2023 invested 60 billion rubles in VK bonds from the National Welfare Fund of the Russian Federation.

Ability to hide obscene words in posts and comments

VKontakte April 19, 2023 announced the launch for users of the ability to hide obscene words in posts and comments. The user can enable the corresponding filter in the "Settings." The update will become available to users gradually. On April 19, 2023, the function works in Russian.

When you enable the setting, obscene words in posts and comments will be replaced with a set of characters. At the user's choice, the statement can be displayed in its original form - when you click on the expression, the user will see a special ram that will offer the corresponding option.

The initiative was a continuation of the VKontakte strategy to create a comfortable digital environment for all users. Earlier within its framework, the social network launched the "Personal Space" mode, which allows you to protect yourself from unwanted attention, as well as warnings about suspicious interlocutors in VK Messenger. This function is designed to replenish the list of flexible tools that give each user the opportunity to form the most comfortable digital environment for themselves on VK platforms.

Шаблон:Quote 'author = said Ivan Korneev, director of moderation policy and interaction with VKontakte users.

Previously, the ability to hide comments containing obscene language or hostile statements became available to community administrators. When such filters are enabled, at the request of the team leader, the corresponding comments from the community are hidden, and the administrator gets a choice of how to interact with them: for example, see the list of filtered comments, delete or restore a specific comment.

Partner Program Update

On April 4, 2023, VKontakte announced that the partner program for communities has been updated and will more support engaging and developing communities. It will cease to be only a monetization tool: in addition, the authors will receive expert recommendations on the creation and promotion of content. The conditions for participation are formed on the basis of research and feedback from communities. The updates will take effect on May 1, 2023 for new participants, the current members of the partner program will have until the fall to adapt to the changes.

The updated criteria will not only strengthen support for active and engaging communities, but will also help authors of different formats and scales reach a new level. To form the conditions, the team conducted additional studies and processed feedback from hundreds of authors. From May 1, new members of the partner program must meet one of these conditions.

First option. For a calendar month, the audience of the community should increase by at least 1250 people. At the same time, a total of 30% of subscribers should watch any content from the community: recordings, stories, clips - at least once a month.

Second option. The community must have at least 500 thousand subscribers, and 30% of them must watch the public's content at least once in the previous calendar month.

It will become easier to monitor whether the community fits the criteria thanks to the expanded analytics in the Monetization section - from April 4, 2023, it appeared in all communities. In the future, statistics will become even more detailed: it will show what makes up payments, how income differs from different formats of content and what can affect earnings. The team will closely monitor analytics and feedback from authors, share recommendations and develop a research-based program.

In the updated partner program, a large area of ​ ​ community support from the VK team will appear. It will combine help across four key blocks: content creation, distribution, post-support and training. Both partner program participants and those who do not yet fulfill the new conditions will be able to get additional knowledge and skills in working on social networks: it is enough to create unique content and increase the audience by at least 850 active users per month.

For each community, depending on the stage of its development and needs, relevant tools will be selected. Authors who have expert support available will receive a message from the official community of the VK Community Affairs Department.

In 2022, the total income of VKontakte communities from content amounted to 4 billion rubles. Publics using official monetization tools - partner program, VK Donut, video monetization and others - increased revenue by 87% compared to 2021. The main source of income in the social network remains a partner program for authors: its participants receive deductions from user views of advertising records in the news feed, stories and videos.

Creating the service "Cover from VKontakte"

On March 2, 2023, VKontakte presented a service that will give the audience more opportunities for self-expression and will emphasize individuality using covers. The neural network instantly generates images based on the interests of users: their reactions, subscriptions to communities and, in general, behavior on the site.

To create images, just go to the "Cover from VKontakte" service and click the "Start" button. Artistic intelligence will immediately generate six covers in different styles, taking into account the interests of the user. All that remains is to select one of the options and click Set Skin. After that, the image will automatically appear in the profile - the result can be shared through publications or stories.

The service has many updated styles in which users can get covers: "Suprematism," "Futurism," "Pointillism," "Mosaic," "Cyberpunk" and others. If the neural network does not have enough information about the person, she will ask to add data or subscribe to communities that reflect his interests.

The covers in the profiles help to emphasize individuality, stand out and draw the attention of the audience to their hobbies. Users liked this way of expressing themselves, they add covers to their profiles. This feature further expands the ability to creatively design a virtual space: the service offers personalized illustrations for each person. VKontakte neural networks allow you to visually demonstrate the interests of the user, and they do it in style and accurately. The generative cover can show what kind of sports the profile owner is interested in, his musical preferences, or in which games he sticks. VKontakte invests in high-speed technologies that allow you to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of as large an audience as possible and at the same time require a minimum amount of resources and time, quickly solving the necessary tasks, noted Alexander Tobol, CTO VKontakte, Vice President for Technology and Development VK.

Covers are part of a large-scale update of the VKontakte profile, which allows you to issue a full-fledged digital business card and helps develop a personal brand. The main information about the user comes to the fore in the profile, and you can go to contacts and a detailed description of interests. This approach provides opportunities for self-expression and simplifies the exchange of information, taking into account the high speed of content consumption in the world.

Availability of traffic police notifications and fines

On January 18, 2023 Ministry of Digital Development , it announced that it was pensions penalties TRAFFIC POLICE now possible to receive messages about the assigned payments and the progress of enforcement proceedings or those appointed through social network VKontakte and. VK Messenger Alerts will come from. Public services Read more. here

2022

Launch the Business Community Quality Index program

On December 15, 2022, VK announced that it was launching a program to support and motivate entrepreneurs - the Business Community Quality Index.

The quality index will be an additional measure of support and motivation for entrepreneurs. The higher its value, the more advantages the business will receive on the social network VKontakte: from the priority of goods in search to discounts on advertising.

The quality index is a motivation and training program, the purpose of which is to help entrepreneurs develop their business community on VKontakte in an interactive and understandable form. Whether full information about the company is indicated on the page, whether the business actively publishes content, whether the community has verification - these and other parameters are taken into account in a single indicator on a scale from 0 to 5.

Thanks to the new tool, the most active entrepreneurs will receive additional support from VK. In order for the index to be higher, you must perform tasks in the community settings. They take into account parameters from three groups: moderation, customer loyalty and filling the business page.

When a community completes tasks and achieves a new score, additional bonuses are opened for it. For example, discounts on promotion, access to priority support, specialist assistance in setting up ads and other features. Detailed information about the seller, correctly executed product cards, the presence of verification - all this affects the assessment. More completed tasks - higher score.

VKontakte has a large number of tools available for business development. With their help, communities can talk about their business, sell goods and promote their offers, and users can get the best experience. An important task of the quality index is to help entrepreneurs use the capabilities of the social network in such a way as to build simple and effective interaction with the audience.

The quality index is updated once a day. Now only community leaders see it. The score is displayed on the home page under the cover and community name.

Simplify verification of business communities through the Digital МСП.РФ Platform

The company VK , together with, Digital platform МСП.РФ the operator of which acts, SME Corporation launches testing of simplified verification of VKontakte business communities. VK announced this on December 2, 2022. Thanks to the authorizations platform, entrepreneurs do not have to reload scans of documents. If you agree to the transfer, data the necessary information will be automatically pulled into the application.

Verification is a confirmation of the authenticity of a page and a guarantee that a real person or organization is behind it. If such a check is passed, then a special mark in the form of a blue tick appears to the right of the group name. Confirmed communities cause more trust among users, and receive priority in search, due to which they can receive more organic traffic.

You can apply for verification in the community settings. The ability to get it in a simplified way will appear automatically during filling out the form if the user selects the Business category and the Legal Entity or PI type in it.

To work with the МСП.РФ platform, it is necessary that a business be added to the user profile on Public services. After reviewing the application, the page will have a confirmed organization icon.

Simplified verification will be available in the web version of VKontakte. At the first stage, 50% of communities can take part in the test. As a result of the experiment, the program can be expanded to all communities of the social network.

Authors and communities increased earnings by 88% over the year

The social network VKontakte on November 8, 2022 reported a significant increase in the number of groups and public pages in the third quarter of 2022, as well as the earnings of authors using the official tools of the social network. The number of created VKontakte communities increased by 28% year-on-year.

Views of the tape increased by 45%. Also, due to the increase in audience activity and the development of algorithms, the number of subscriptions has increased: over the year, users are 25% more likely to join communities.

The social network paid special attention to the earnings of the authors. The revenue of communities using official VKontakte monetization tools (video monetization, partner program, VK Donut and others) in the third quarter increased by 88% year-on-year. The VK Donut platform allows you to monetize content with a monthly subscription: it can have exclusive materials, early access to new products, closed contests, meetings and promotions. For three months, from July to September, the authors earned 126 million rubles with the help of VK Donut. This is 3 times more than a year earlier. The number of communities that use the platform has grown 1.5 times year-on-year. The number of subscribers transferring funds through VK Donut has more than 2 times increased.

Also, the VKontakte Team continues to develop the direction of video monetization. Recently, the social network presented the opportunity to monetize live broadcasts. With this and other product improvements, communities' total monthly earnings through video monetization have risen 10-fold in the past year. More than 15,000 communities have already joined the program.

In the third quarter of 2022, testing began on another earning opportunity for communities: through the publication of stories and clips on VKontakte. You can increase revenue with these tools in the updated partner program.

Earlier in 2022, VKontakte launched the largest author support program. In March and April, the social network did not charge communities a commission for using monetization tools. Thanks to the support program and increased activity on the site in the second quarter of 2022, communities using official VKontakte monetization tools increased revenue by 116% year-on-year.

The program of free access to socially significant sites includes only state Public services and VKontakte

The program of free access to socially significant sites included only state Public services and VKontakte. As it became known on August 19, 2022, the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation found other resources for the Accessible Internet project, except for the social network and the Public services portal. Read more here.

Warning users about password leaks in other services

VKontakte announced on August 18, 2022 that VK will help further secure accounts. Now the VKontakte user will receive a notification if the password is the same as his password in the databases of leaked third-party services. In this case, the entire process is completely automatic, passwords are checked only in encrypted form and on VK servers. The function is already available on the VKontakte social network, and in the future it will appear in other VK services.

The VK security team regularly monitors leaks from other services - both local and international. When information about new compromised data appears on the network, employees promptly check it for accuracy and take into account user warnings in the system.

Previously, you could see a similar warning when trying to create a new password in your VK ID account - the company has long prevented the use of data that previously fell into the leak databases. However, many users have not changed passwords for years and at the same time use the same combination in several services - these are the users who are often at risk. To secure them, the company has created a tool that will automatically check for passwords in the compromised database and warn users before scammers are interested in their profile, noted Olga Frolova, Director of Ecosystem Products at VK.

VK also strengthened password requirements. When changing the password in the VK ID personal account, you will not be able to create the same type of simple password or use public profile data - you need to come up with a complex combination of different characters. Such a password will better protect users and save them from potential troubles.

Even as a child, we are taught that when crossing the road, you definitely need to look around - this will help reduce risks. In the same way, information security works: if you know the rules and do not forget about caution, the risk of losing access to your account becomes much lower. As part of VK Protect, the company is creating more and more tools to protect users, but at the same time we advise you not to forget about the basic rules - for example, regular password changes and two-factor authentication. And we recommend not to use the same passwords in different services. If one of them is hacked one day, other accounts will be at risk, told Alexey Volkov, Vice President, Director of Information Security of VK.

Earlier, VKontakte began to warn about suspicious interlocutors in the messenger. Now in a group chat or conversation with a stranger there is a notification of a potential danger - if the algorithms recorded suspicious activity from this user. So it is more difficult for scammers to fraudulently get money, passwords and other personal data from the user.

The ability to listen to the tape using the columns "VK Capsule" and "VK Capsule" Mini

Mail Mail.Ru received voice control on smart speakers VK Capsule and VK Capsule Mini. VK announced this on June 30, 2022. Read more here.

Testing of the procedure for verifying the pages of state organizations through the EPGU

and Ministry of Digital Development VKontakte are testing the procedure for additional verification of the pages the Russian state of organizations in. Their social network representatives will be able to confirm the authenticity of communities using. portal of Public services The pages for which this mechanism will be available are official publics of schools hospitals and authorities. This feature will help distinguish confirmed pages of government organizations from unofficial publics. The Ministry of Digital Development announced this on June 29, 2022.

The creators and administrators of VKontakte pages, who simultaneously have the status of an administrator or head in the organization's personal account on Public services, will be able to use the additional verification mechanism.

To verify the public, you must:

• Go to the community management section;
• In the "Basic Information" select "Confirm status through Public services" - the transition to the portal page will occur automatically;
• Log in to the Public services on behalf of the organization;
• Agree to information verification. After that, in the community management section, the verification status will change to "Application under consideration."
• After successful completion of the verification, a mark of the state organization will appear on the community page.

This measure will help reduce the risk of fake pages, obtaining information from unverified sources, and will also be an additional security guarantee for users. Community administrators will make the decision to submit an application on their own, obtaining a mark is not mandatory for creating a VKontakte community.

In the future, thanks to the integration of Public services services with VKontakte, users will be able, for example, to sign up for circles and watch the schedule of classes through school publics or make an appointment with a doctor directly from the pages of clinics.

Launch Support Program for Live Creators

Vkontakte June 15, 2022 announced the launch of a support program for authors of live broadcasts.

The social network will offer active streamers free promo on the site - this is how the platform will help new authors tell a wide audience about their content and gain first subscribers. Streamers will be able to get a month of promotion assistance, a place in the top of communities in the Bloggers category, as well as announcements mentioning the project in the VK Video Creators community. All authors who came or returned on VKontakte from March 1, 2022 will be able to join the support program.

The program will introduce VKontakte users to new authors who create original and interesting content, but have not previously actively maintained a page on the social network. The program will be able to get authors of content of any topic: streams of master classes, everyday life, travel, passing computer games and much more. Authors who are just starting a career will be able to take a free video blogging training course and receive advice from specialists from the VKontakte Team. Beginners will learn how to create a personal brand and build communities around it, which topics to choose, which life hacks will help improve their content.

VKontakte brings together millions of content creators. They lead communities, find their audience and share videos, clips, music, photos, podcasts, stories: every year the authors publish over 5.6 billion materials. The team develops algorithms for promoting high-quality publications in news feeds and recommendations, and partner program, market platform, VK Donut and other monetization tools help authors earn money. In the VKontakte community with authors, you can find links, tips and news that will be useful to both novice and experienced content makers.

VKontakte notes a record increase in audience interest in video content - in March, the VK Video platform reached a record of 2.45 billion daily views. According to Brand Analytics, in March, more than 27 million authors published over 468 million posts and comments on VKontakte, which is more than on all other sites combined.

Add Billing and Payment Functionality

CraftTalk expanded the capabilities of integration its platform for interaction with customers through social network Vkontakte (VK). Now, with the help of CraftTalk, the social network messenger can integrate financial functionality for billing and payment right in. This was messenger announced by CraftTalk on April 05, 2022. More here

Free access to the social network through the "Available Internet" option

Most mobile operators have connected the "Accessible Internet" option, thanks to which access to Public services and the Vkontakte social network will be free. The Ministry of Digital Development announced this on February 25, 2022. Read more here.

2021

Alfa-Bank evicts VKontakte from Singer's house due to low rental price in documents

On September 22, 2021, it became known that Alfa-Bank filed a lawsuit to invalidate the sublease agreements with VKontakte. The credit institution believes that the deal following which the social network occupied a room in the Singer House in the center of St. Petersburg was concluded at a value below the market value. The lease agreement was signed by Andrei Isaev, who was in charge of the building at that time, and later he was accused of embezzling the property of the  Baltic Bank.

Formally, the lessor in this case is Kazan Bridge LLC, the press service of Alfa-Bank told RBC Petersburg. According to the credit institution, this company is also controlled by Andrei Isaev. The contract with VKontakte may be declared invalid, since this is required by Singer CJSC, which filed a lawsuit with the arbitration court.

Meanwhile, the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region invalidated the sublease agreements between Singer CJSC and the owner of the St. Petersburg House of Books store. Its area is 4 thousand square meters.

It is noted that the "House of Books" paid for rent 4 thousand square meters. m. About 7 million rubles a month. This is despite the fact that, according to experts, the rental cost can be about 12 million. This figure is almost twice as much as real payment.

Contrary to the position of the defendant, the court considers the proven position of the plaintiff on the presence of collusion (joint actions) of the parties to the contested transactions to the detriment of the interests of ZAO Singer, since the purpose and result of the conclusion of the contested transactions was the actual loss of ZAO Singer control over the property transferred to it for long-term lease by the city, the redirection of cash flows in the form of income from sublease from ZAO Singer to LLC Bookstore No. 1, - reported in the press service of the arbitration court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region.[1]

Launch a method to warn users of potentially invalid information

On September 3, 2021, it became known that Odnoklassniki and VKontakte launched a special way to warn users about potentially inaccurate information in test mode - such publications will be accompanied by a special label. The warning can be seen when viewing the material - this way users will not be limited in receiving information, but they will see a signal that they need to be treated with caution. The decision on the further use of the tool will be made based on the results of tests and feedback from users.

As reported, issues related to the dissemination of false information are becoming more and more acute for society. This became especially obvious during the pandemic. COVID-19 There are publications that cancer the tumor can be cured with honey, that garlic and ginger infusion protect against, and coronavirus towers 5G spread it, that the Earth is flat, and vaccinations cause autism. OK and VK also receive complaints about this and content are looking for solutions to help users quickly learn about posting potentially false information, better navigate content and stay in. safety

The warning will mark the content that users of the social network complained about. The label will appear only if the facts in the publication are false and received a direct refutation in the media or from experts from international and local competent organizations (for example, the World Health Organization). Personal opinion and value judgments, as well as jokes, parodies and memes, are not marked as potentially unreliable.

Based on the results of testing, VKontakte and Odnoklassniki plan to create public principles for working with inaccurate information, as well as a community of independent experts on fact-checking. Social networks are negotiating with experts who will help develop standards for moderating such content - both within social networks and for the entire industry. OK and VK invite fact checkers, professional journalists, scientists and public organizations to work together. To participate in the test program, you need to contact representatives of social networks at these addresses: factcheck@corp.vk.com and factcheck@ok.ru

You can report resonant publications that contain false information using the "Complain" button on VKontakte, choosing the reason for the "Deception" complaint and the "Misleading" category. You can read about the current VKontakte approach to moderating inaccurate information in the updated section "Security Center": vk.com/safety. Classmates will soon introduce a separate category of user complaints about unreliable content in the social network interface.

Earlier, VKontakte began to accompany publications about COVID-19 in the news feed with a special label with reference to the unified coronavirus information center. In total, since the beginning of the pandemic, the VKontakte team has deleted almost 2 million of the same type of records in communities and spam mailings with false information about the coronavirus, created a single information center and a thematic news feed from trusted sources.

Restarting the Video Platform

VKontakte on August 20, 2021 announced the restart of the video platform - there are a number of current technologies as part of the updates. The proprietary adaptive video streaming technology with a scalable architecture completely removes restrictions on the simultaneous number of viewers connected to one broadcast, and provides viewing on networks with an unstable connection and on weak devices. Read more here.

Adding an Employee Search Tool for SMBs

On August 6, 2021, VKontakte presented a tool for small and medium-sized businesses to find employees on the social network.

Entrepreneurs right in their communities can create vacancies and find employees from any device. Creating a vacancy does not require any special skills and takes several minutes. All you need to do is go to the community administrator panel on the Business of Vkontakte platform. After clicking the "Find Employee" button, you just need to enter the company name and add a job description. The rest of the information will be pulled up automatically from the profile. After the vacancy, it will be published in the feed of vacancies on the VK Work service and in a special section of VKontakte.

More than 2 million SMEs are already developing their VKontakte business and are potential employers. That is why we, together with VKontakte, have developed another solution for entrepreneurs so that it becomes easier and faster for them to hire staff. In their community, they could already create sites, run ads or publish product cards. Now we have made it possible to find employees without being distracted by third-party resources, - comments Alla Arshevskaya, Managing Director of the VK Work service.

When responding to a vacancy, the applicant will be included in the "Work" section. If he did not have a resume, he will be able to create it without leaving the social network. If the user has already responded to job offers, he will only have to click on the "Respond" button.

The search for VKontakte employees is also available to those entrepreneurs who do not have their own community. In this case, they can go to the social network menu in the "Work" section, create a vacancy and choose additional placement in thematic communities or job search groups.

Opening of the headquarters in St. Petersburg next to St. Isaac's Cathedral

Vkontakte August 6, 2021, it announced the opening of an office in St. Petersburg at 30 Bolshaya Morskaya Street, near St. Isaac's Cathedral.

The headquarters is located in a historical place: the house was built here in the 40s of the XVIII century. Previously, it was owned by merchants, and another furniture factory and fashion store Madame Sichler managed to work there. In the early 2000s, a major reconstruction of the building was carried out.

VKontakte is located on the second, third and fourth floors, a little later the sixth floor with an open terrace will be launched - the team plans to hold internal events, work meetings and meet sunsets overlooking St. Isaac's Cathedral. Part of the workspace will be reserved for co-working space for those who have chosen a hybrid mode of operation. These are universal jobs - they are not assigned to one person, but are booked exactly on the day when the employee needs to come to headquarters.

Шаблон:Quote 'author = said Marina Krasnova, CEO of VKontakte.

The office opened two minutes from the VKontakte headquarters in the House at the Red Bridge and ten minutes from the main one in the Singer House. In addition to St. Petersburg, VKontakte has a headquarters in Moscow and another, visiting, in Sochi.

The court forbade the Skolkovo resident to collect open data from VKontakte

The Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal revised the conclusions of the court of first instance: he admitted in the actions of Double Data a violation of the rights to use the VKontakte database. The court banned Double Data from extracting and using user data, and also recovered compensation in the amount of 1 ruble. VKontakte announced this on July 6, 2021. Read more here.

Launching a neural network to combat threats in the comments

On February 26, 2021, the Vkontakte announced that it would help users face bullying less often in community comments. A special filter has become available to administrators to combat hostile statements - it is based on a neural network. The filter can be turned on and off in community settings at any time, and by default it is turned off. The function for February 2021 appeared in the owners of 50% of the public, and will soon become available to everyone.

At the beginning of 2021 algorithms , they know how to identify direct threats - wishes, death promises to harm health and threats of reprisals. VKontakte developers will continue testing the filter: in the future, it may learn to recognize other signs of intolerance - for example, bullying by nationality or religion. Filtered publications are available to community leaders with the ability to restore them, but the test run showed that the filtered comments are returned only 1% of the time.

VKontakte millions of communities of interest - from groups of series fans to clubs of lovers of cross-stitching, from pages of international brands to public with abstract memes. Each of them has a different atmosphere and its own principles of communication within the framework of the general rules of VK. We want to give administrators the opportunity to make the environment in their communities more benevolent: subscribers will be able to have a constructive dialogue and not be afraid to receive a cruel comment in response. Our moderation reacts in a matter of minutes to user requests, and with the help of a filter of hostile statements, this time will be minimized - direct threats will be removed instantly. reported by VKontakte Team.

Filter testing was launched in November 2020. As of February 2021, the function has already been used by the leaders of over 10% of all VKontakte communities - this is 13 million public pages, groups and events. Community administrators assessed the work of the neural network - among those who connected the filter, only 1.8% subsequently refused comments from it. At the same time, many wrote in Support with a request to activate the function.

To create algorithms that understand spoken language well, a large number of texts in Russian were used - for example, subtitles from films, TV shows and videos. The neural network contains a special attention mechanism that allows you to make decisions based on the importance of words and their combinations. Developers study the logic of decision-making - this allows you to correct errors, take into account the context and more efficiently train algorithms. As of February 2021, the neural network correctly identifies threats in 80% of cases, and the team continues to work to improve it.

VKontakte offers other functions to protect against bullying. Any user can send a complaint to the moderation service if the publication contains insult, threats or hostile statements - the "Complain" button has records, comments, photos and videos, stories, clips. Earlier, the platform introduced the "Close Friends" function: users can create a list of people who are especially trusted, and share the secret on the profile wall only with them. For more information on how VKontakte prevents the spread of hate speech, see the Platform Norms section.

2020

Single VK Combo subscription, 128-person video calls and voice message recognition

On December 25, 2020, VKontakte announced the summing up of the 2020 product results. The team presented 220 major updates, including a service of short vertical videos with AR special effects Clips, a single VK Combo subscription, group video calls for 128 people without a time limit, voice message recognition and monetization tools for authors.

Audiences and communities

• VKontakte remains the largest super-application and the country's main social network: according to Mediascope, almost half of the Runet audience (47.5%) visits VKontakte every day, and in a month coverage reaches 76.8%.
• The number of active communities grew by 23% over the year. In particular, by 60% - educational, by 49% - gaming, by 37% - entertainment, by 29% - sports, by 25% - music.

Messenger and calls

• The pandemic and product updates have made online communication more active: every day, VKontakte users exchange 15 billion messages. This is 50% more than last year.
• The interlocutors began to record voice messages more often: the number of audio messages sent increased by 10%. Perhaps users are less worried about whether it will be convenient to listen to their thoughts - after all, in June VKontakte introduced recognition technology, thanks to which you can read the content of 99% of all audio messages. In total, 33 million people a month listen to and dictate voice messages.
• The number of people who communicate using VKontakte calls has grown by 22% year-on-year. All due to the fact that they are free, unite up to 128 people - even those who do not have a VKontakte profile are not limited in time and have everything they need for comfortable study, work and friendly conversations.

Videos: clips, stories, broadcasts and other videos

• In June, VKontakte launched Clips - a service of short vertical videos with AR special effects and gesture control. In just six months, the clips have collected almost 31 billion views - 14 million people watch them every day.
• Users also like to create clips: 3 million videos have already been published in the section.
• Activity is also growing in stories where people share moments from life. There were 30% more authors, 15% more viewers.
• Users also upload videos directly to the VKontakte player more often: such videos have become 11% more daily than last year.
• The VKontakte audience often watches broadcasts of lectures, master classes, sports matches, conferences, concerts, interviews and other events. The monthly audience of live broadcasts is 45 million people. The success of the format was confirmed by VK Fest - this year the festival was completely held online and lasted 7 days. Its broadcasts collected 280 million views.
• Every day, videos collect more than 900 million views - this is a new record for VKontakte.

Music and podcasts

• The subscription is in increasing demand: over 4 million people have issued premium access to music.
• In just a year, the VKontakte audience spent 548,177 years listening to music.
• VKontakte users continue to get acquainted with the podcast format: this year the number of listeners has increased 3.5 times.

VK Connect

• VK Connect - a single account for VKontakte and Mail.ru Group services - appeared in June. Since then, 15.6 million people have already been authorized with its help - and this is not counting the users of the social network. Moreover, on average in 2020, this number grew by 70% every month.
• In addition to VKontakte, VK Connect has already fully or partially implemented 12 products. Soon a single account will appear in other Mail.ru Group projects, and in the future it is planned to connect to VK Connect and external partners.

Monetization Tools: VK Donut and Partner Program

• In just five months after the launch, thousands of authors joined VK Donut and earned more than 25 million rubles with its help. Each month, the number of dons (paying subscribers) grows by 30%.
• More than 10 thousand authors connected to the VKontakte advertising network. The most successful communities earn about a million rubles a month with its help.
• In December, VKontakte introduced a single monetization platform with a new partner program for communities - with its help, authors will be able to earn 50% more.

Games and services of the VK Mini Apps platform

• Traditionally, the VKontakte Games are popular. Over the year, the catalog has tripled, and the number of people who play on mobile devices has doubled.
• There are 11 thousand more services on the VK Mini Apps platform in a year - and now users choose from 25 thousand projects. There are mini-applications on the platform for almost any business, so they are used more often: the active audience grew by 65% over the year and in the fourth quarter exceeded 33 million people a month.

Business, Social Commerce and VK Pay

• Over the year, the number of active businesses has doubled - more than 2 million companies and entrepreneurs are represented on VKontakte. Since the beginning of April, more than 150 thousand of them have received financial support from VKontakte to launch the promotion.
• In VK, 190 thousand active sellers are those who regularly place goods and find customers. Every hour, VKontakte users view 4.2 million goods.
• Improved ad tools brought advertisers 18% more transitions than a year earlier. Keyword targeting, launched in September, is already 10% of advertisers' spending - and that number is growing.
• The number of advertisers running ads using simple tools - mobile promotion and auto-promotion of goods - has grown 3.5 times over the year.
• In a pandemic, the possibility of online payment is especially necessary, which is why the number of VK Pay users has grown by 50% - this is more than 16 million people.

The European Commission has included VKontakte and Telegram in the list of pirated resources

In mid-December 2020, the European Commission published an updated list of pirated sites - the "Watch List for Counterfeit and Piracy." For the first time, it included the Telegram messenger and the VKontakte social network.

The list is formed on the basis of reports from groups of copyright holders. They reported that Telegram users, including public channels, "exchange illegal content, in particular music, books, news publications, films and television programs." In addition, subscribers share links to other sites that host pirated content, according to the European Commission.

The European Commission believes that Telegram does not respond quickly enough to pirated content, and VKontakte provides users with the ability to access pirated books and films, including through built-in players.

In the social network "VKontakte," in response to the claims, they stated that they were introducing new measures, and also constantly notifying users of the need to comply with copyright. The company also noted that it is considering more than a million complaints, most of which ended with the removal of pirated content.

The Watch List for Counterfeit and Piracy "was created by the European Commission in 2018. It contains four sections: online services that provide or facilitate access to pirated content, online trading platforms, online pharmacies and drug distribution services, and offline marketplaces.

The 56-page document includes old resources such as The Pirate Bay, Rapidgator, SciHub and Y2mate, as well as some new sites. In addition to Telegram and VKontakte, the new version of the list includes the online platforms Seasonvar and Rutracker, popular in Russia, as well as the Gorbushkin Dvor shopping center in Moscow.^[2]

Instagram has more users in Russia than VKontakte

In October 2020, Instagram has more active users in Russia than VKontakte - 64 against 49 million people, respectively. This is stated in the annual study of the social media analysis system and SMIBrand Analytics. Experts assessed the popularity of social networks based on the number of new authors and their activity in each of the services. Read more here.

Add Audio Recognition Technology

Vkontakte November 27, 2020 announced an improvement in voice message recognition technology. Now, in just a second, you can decrypt recordings up to two minutes long - this is 99% of all audio that users send. And in cases where you want to tell a long story, you can record a voice with a duration of up to an hour.

Voice messages continue to be a popular type of attachment in the VKontakte messenger, overtaking, for example, photos and files. VK launched recognition technology in June. Since that moment, the audience that uses voice has grown by 10% - as of November 2020, it is 33 million people a month. On average, each user of the service reads 8 decryptions per day.

Audio message recognition technology is the VKontakte Team's own development. To translate longer records into text without sacrificing speed, the developers found a different technological solution. Algorithms automatically break long audio into short blocks, decrypt them all at the same time, and then combine them back into one message. At the same time, they are able to separate the recording without breaking words into parts, so as not to distort the meaning of what was said - for this, Voice Activity Detection technology is used. It takes about a second to recognize a message.

{{quote 'author = said Sergey Larionenko, senior developer of the Core Infrastructure VKontakte team' Audio recognition technology helps voice message lovers and haters communicate with each other in a convenient format, and also saves time - read the decryption as quickly as possible than listen to audio. Our solution consists of several neural networks, withstands a high load, understands Russian-language slang and shows good results even under difficult recording conditions - for example, extraneous noise or crumpled speech. We will continue to develop the technology, increase its speed and improve the quality of recognition. }}

Voice message recognition is fully automated. For training neural networks, audio is used, which are recorded specifically for this task by participants in the VK Testers program.

Earlier, VKontakte transformed the "Messages" section into "Messenger": the ability to write to a person by phone number was added to calls and chats. In the messenger, you can not only correspond, but also arrange group video calls for 128 people for free: there are no duration restrictions, you can join the conversation anonymously even without a profile on the social network, a screen demonstration is available for work or educational tasks, and you can use the service on any device.

Launch of "Market" - a marketplace with goods from stores and friends

On September 18, 2020, VKontakte presented Market, a marketplace that contains all the usual capabilities of online stores, as well as the advantages characteristic of the social network: goods from communities and user friends, personal collections and recommendations, the ability to add your product. The section will help users find products that they will not meet at other sites, and business - receive more orders.

As of September 2020, Market has collected offers from 190 thousand sellers. Users will see an assortment of various stores - both large and local, as well as products from friends and communities from subscriptions. In particular, the showcase will house the latest collections of favorite brands, discount offers, handmade goods and much more.

"Market" will help you find both something specific and an idea to buy. To do this, the section contains a search and thematic categories, as well as personal collections and recommendations that will constantly improve. Algorithms take into account the city, age, hobbies, season - and leave products in these blocks that the user is most likely to like. Make purchases, pay with a bank card or through VK Pay, monitor the status of orders - all this can also be done right in the Market.

To make shopping comfortable, stores with online payment, order delivery and verification receive an advantage in search results. All this allows you to draw the attention of users to trusted sellers who leave their customers satisfied.

In the coming days, the section will be available to all users in the menu of the desktop version of VKontakte or by direct link (vk.com/market). In the future, it will appear in the mobile application, teaming up with the "Purchases" tape.

Irina Denezhkina, VKontakte e-commerce director:

In the "Market" there are functions without which it is difficult to imagine anyone: online store thematic categories, convenient search, list of orders, information about promotions. But against the background of all other sites, "Market" stands out for the sociality that is possible thanks to VKontakte. For example, only in VK will users meet products from communities and people they follow. In addition, we can more accurately set up recommendations, because potential buyers indicate their age, city, gender and interests in the profile. We plan to continue to develop the social side of the section - for example, add reviews for goods from bloggers and other users.

VKontakte is actively developing a social commerce platform. Earlier, the company added the ability to pay for purchases in communities with a bank card, and also launched the delivery of goods through SDEK and Boxberry.

Launch Context Targeting

VKontakte September 15, 2020 presented the next product for business - now promotion is available through key phrases.

The tool will allow you to launch advertising campaigns even for business representatives whose goods or services are not traditionally easy to find on social networks. For example, companies that sell gluten-free products, premium clothing brands or capsule coffee machines. With the help of context targeting, the smallest advertisers will be able to find their audience.

The system takes into account the actions of users of all Mail.ru Group and VKontakte projects: search, go to communities, view goods and others. The advertiser itself sets the criteria for the target audience using keywords and minus words. The tool helps to show advertising to an audience in hot demand - in the settings you can specify the period for which you were looking for a product or service. Thus, targeting by keywords will allow advertising to be shown to those who are most likely to become a buyer.

The advertising office has a simple interface, there are tips and examples from VKontakte for business - so even beginners will master the tool. In addition, the algorithm will prompt for additional phrases with coverage prediction. He will offer to add a list of synonymous phrases to existing ones and show the amount of audience that used them when searching. For example, if you enter a "robot vacuum cleaner," the system will offer to supplement - "smart vacuum cleaner," "automatic vacuum cleaner," "robot vacuum cleaner wet cleaning" and so on. Key phrases can be used for any format - advertising records, site advertising, stories advertising and TGB. You can pay to show ads for clicks (CPC) or thousands of impressions (CPM), as well as choose auto strategies for any of the purposes: maximum impressions or clicks, entries, applications.

Irina Rumyantseva, Advertising Technology Product Director, Mail.ru Group:

Keyword targeting allows you to work with complex topics, in fact, create your own interests that more accurately meet the goals of the advertising campaign and describe the audience - for example, you can enter not just a request "buy shoes," but "buy running shoes." Moreover, the advertiser will be able to catch up with the audience of competitors, find the target audience for related requests, which the consumer also drives in. For example, "mortgage" - for the sale of new buildings, "apartment rental" - for road transportation. At the testing stage, we have already observed high efficiency in such areas as finance, real estate, online stores of clothes, gadgets, household appliances, furniture, as well as in all kinds of services - from master classes in painting to cosmetic procedures. Previously, keyword targeting performed well in myTarget, now it is available to all VKontakte advertisers for business.

To customize contextual targeting, just enter a list of phrases, separating them with commas or hyphenating a line. For more accurate coverage, it is important to specify the search period and minus words - those that need to be excluded. For example, to set up an advertisement for the sale of elite real estate, you can add "business class apartment" to keywords, "rent," "rent" to minus words, and set, for example, 30 days in the search period. Then the system will find exactly the audience that wanted to buy expensive real estate over the past month, and will not show an announcement to those looking for rent or economy class real estate.

Testing a neural network to combat hate speech

VKontakte is working on artificial intelligence for automatic recognition of materials with "heitspich" - hostile statements. The technology is designed to speed up the processing time of complaints and help users face intolerance less often, the social network reported on August 20, 2020.

It is expected that the neural network will help to quickly find materials with hostile statements, as well as publications that provoke the audience to show aggression. The neural network learns to identify a variety of categories of insults and threats. Among them are manifestations of xenophobia, racism, homophobia, sexism and other prejudices, as well as insults on the basis of religious affiliation, age, appearance or the presence of diseases.

To strengthen moderation on the topic of hate speech and train artificial intelligence, VKontakte added a category of complaints - "Hostile statements." The user can select it if he clicks the "Complain" button on the offensive publication. After that, the material will be submitted to the moderators. This category will allow you to more accurately calibrate existing tools and collect data for new solutions based on neural networks. At the same time, the Moderation and Support teams not only respond to complaints, but also conduct proactive internal monitoring - in particular, using automatic search mechanisms, digital fingerprint technology and neural networks.

"We share the position of our users and partners regarding hate speech and glorification of violence. VKontakte moderators process a huge amount of content every day, including using artificial intelligence - most dangerous materials are removed even before someone sees them. If you notice an offensive post, complain about it. Manifestations of intolerance are more effective to fight together - and we urge users to join us in this struggle, "said Ivan Korneev, head of the VKontakte moderation team.

In the first half of 2020, 520 thousand pieces of content on the topic of inciting hatred and hatred were removed on the platform, and 1340 profiles and 2470 communities spreading hostile statements were blocked.

Testing indecent gesture recognition in "Clips"

VKontakte trains algorithms to recognize indecent gestures in "Clips" - a service with short vertical videos that any user can create without even having editing skills or professional equipment. The company announced this on July 17, 2020. Testing takes place as part of an experiment: the platform team assumes that such a solution will make watching videos more comfortable for viewers, and will also help not to face negativity.

It is planned that the system will be able to notice rough gestures in the videos - for example, if someone shows the middle finger, and then blur them or close them with a black rectangle. This function is based on gesture recognition technology, thanks to which you can control the shooting of clips by moving your hands.

"Clips" is an endless tape with short vertical videos on topics ranging from entertainment to education. Among the key features of the service are AR effects and gesture control, which opens up completely different opportunities for creating content and interacting with viewers.

In the first month of work, "Clips" collected 3 billion views. On average, clips collect 183 million views per day, 6.5 million Likes and 108 thousand comments.

Local News Feed Launch in Kazakhstan

On July 9, 2020, VKontakte announced the launch of a local news feed in Kazakhstan. Users will find in it up-to-date information about the coronavirus from trusted sources, as well as publications of local media, announcements of performances by Kazakhstani artists, materials from bloggers, stars and opinion leaders.

The tape is available to residents of Kazakhstan from the phone - in the "Interesting" section, from the computer - in the "Kazakhstan" news section, as well as by direct link vk.com/feed/qazaqstan.

The "Kazakhstan" tape publishes news from the official media and celebrity communities, and in the future, records of any authors may appear there. To do this, they just need to create unique and interesting content that will comply with the rules of VKontakte - publications will appear in the feed if they pass the selection.

In early 2020, VKontakte opened its representative office in Almaty, prepared a free set of stickers with the symbol of Kazakhstan - a snow leopard - and presented a draft tape with local news. Previously, a similar city tape appeared in Kazan, Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod.

Adding the ability to make group voice and video calls in the desktop version

On June 3, 2020, the VKontakte company announced that in the desktop version of the site it is now possible to arrange group voice and video calls. With this function, it will become more convenient to have long conversations: discuss work or educational projects, see friends and family, play board or play sports online.

As noted in VK, at the start, up to 8 people can simultaneously communicate in group calls. To start a conversation, you need to open a suitable conversation, press the handset icon and choose who to invite to the call from the chat. You can add an interlocutor right during communication.

"By launching group calls, we erase distances and make it easier to connect between colleagues, pupils, loved ones and friends. It is important for us that users can comfortably communicate in any situation: when the conversation is long or on the run, on business or for the soul. The functionality of the service will expand: we plan to increase the number of participants and add opportunities that will allow us to cope with different tasks, " noted' Vyacheslav Shebanov, head of the VKontakte messenger team

In May 2020, group video calls appeared in the VK mobile application, and before face-to-face calls were available in the VK Messenger desktop messenger. The call initialization system builds optimal routes for calls, eliminates delays and increases connection stability. According to the results of the first quarter of 2020, the monthly number of VKontakte calls increased by 24% compared to the same quarter of 2019 - to 64 million per month.

Creating the Training Platform

On May 14, 2020, VKontakte announced the creation of the Training platform, on which users will be able to play sports under the guidance of professional instructors. Lovers and professionals will be able to choose an exercise course and study for free at home even without inventory. Training will be held live.

The project contains sports and dance directions for users with any level of training. The courses are taught by fitness trainers, choreographers, bloggers and professional athletes. The partner is the Ministry of Sports: regular classes are held on the platform from qualified coaches in various areas - from general physical training to stretching and work on coordination. For the column "Charging with Gazprombank," the video was prepared by the Ambassador of the Russian Football Union of Russia Ruslan Nigmatullin, soloist and choreographer of the Mariinsky Theater Yuri Smekalov, coach of the Zenit Football Club Anatoly Tymoshchuk and other eminent athletes.

Marina Golyadkina, world champion and Olympic medalist in the Denis Dmitriyev cycle track and five-time world champion in synchronized swimming, also confirmed their participation in the Training project, gymnast Samira Mustafieva, founder of the SEKTA project Olga Marquez, bloggers Alexei Likharev, Alexey Stolyarov, Katya Kachenok, Vyacheslav Daichev, TV presenter Irena Ponaroshku, as well as teachers of the PROTANSI center - Sasha Pertsev, Alexey Volkov (Drama Kings) and Polina Khritinina. Soon lessons with Olympians and exercises with astronauts will appear on the platform.

To choose a direction and coach, you need to join the official community of the project and discuss your preferences with the chatbot. According to the survey results, the bot will offer classes and help to draw up a convenient schedule. Also "Training" is available in the application "Coronavirus" (vk.com/covid19).

{{quote 'author = said Alexander Kruglov, Marketing Director of VKontakte' While gyms are closed and you can't even exercise on the horizontal bars in the yard, we all need to maintain a healthy lifestyle. We hope that with the help of the Training project, our users will find interesting and useful activities for themselves, and for coaches this site will be a good way to develop a personal brand and attract an audience to their pages. On the platform there will be lessons for those who simply decided to diversify self-isolation, for those who want to improve their shape and even adapt professional training to home conditions for experienced athletes, }}

Earlier, Vkontakte supported the musicians by providing them with a platform for online concerts. In the VK Mini Apps section, you can subscribe to the "Watch at Home" broadcast poster: every day sports events, classes with professional athletes, as well as tournaments and matches are published here.

Add CRM systems capabilities to Business Pages communication with customers

On April 29, 2020, VKontakte announced the expansion of the functionality of the Business Pages, adding features that were previously available only when connecting third-party CRM systems. Now, in the window of correspondence with the client, sellers will immediately receive the most useful information about it, and will also be able to put labels that are visible only to other administrators. This feature will help you quickly answer user questions and thereby increase audience loyalty, as well as systematize appeals.

In the Business Pages dialog with the user, the administrator will see the main information: when a person subscribed to the community, how many comments and likes have been left in it since the beginning of 2020, as well as if this is open information, how old he is and from which city he is. Thanks to this data, the administrator will ask fewer clarifying questions and will be able to help the user more quickly.

Also, administrators can put up to 20 any labels. For example, with their help it is convenient to designate regular customers and partners, put reminders that you need to "write later," or mark users who came by mistake - and, if there are many of them, reconsider communication in the community. Also in the near future it will be possible to leave comments to the correspondence - it will come in handy if the situation is difficult and it should be described in detail. The labels and comments in the dialog will help managers synchronize with each other and make it easier to analyze messages.

We strive to ensure that the Pages of Business have all the tools that entrepreneurs need. Then you don't have to use third-party programs to solve your problems - in communities everything will be free, convenient and understandable. This time, we have proposed tools to help reduce response time, maintain order in community messages, and analyze them, said Svetlana Chernikova, Head of Internal Marketing VKontakte for Business

Earlier, VKontakte began to tag messages that users send to the Business Page after interacting with advertising with a separate tag. Also, these messages fall into a separate folder. This made it easier to assess the effectiveness of promotion.

Start of automatic movement of goods

On April 27, 2020, VKontakte announced the continuation of active work on the e-commerce platform and is now launching auto-promotion of goods. The advertising tool acts in two directions at once: it attracts the audience with the help of the best offers of the Store and returns users who have already viewed the assortment. At the same time, the algorithms themselves find the goods with the highest indicators and offer them to users who are most likely to make a purchase.

Automatic movement of goods is suitable for both beginners and professionals. To run it, you do not need detailed settings. Just click "Promote" in the "Products" section, and then specify the daily limit and write the text of two ads: for those who have already viewed the Store's catalog, and for those who will see the range for the first time. At the same time, the advertiser can leave an ad only for one audience - for example, if it is the return of customers that interests him.

Then all the work will be done by algorithms. In advertising for the new audience, they will show the most popular products of the Store - and precisely those people who are most likely to switch to purchase. In advertising for those who are already familiar with the assortment, algorithms will offer products from those viewed - but also with the highest performance.

We continue to make our e-commerce platform multifunctional and at the same time simple - so that both people without advertising experience and specialists solve their tasks quickly and easily. Automatic movement of goods allows you not to waste time on targeting settings, assortment analysis and selection of offers that will attract the most customers. A couple of clicks - and the announcement is running, all the work is done by algorithms, and the result is high, said Svetlana Chernikova, Head of Internal Marketing VKontakte for Business

Earlier, VKontakte updated the process of purchasing advertising: it included three existing strategies (including oCPM) in the Automatic Price Control option and added another - the maximum number of clicks. Now advertisers do not have to figure out how the purchasing models differ and which one is better used. It is enough to turn on the option "Automatic price control" and choose what result is needed from the announcement. And then the system will do everything: it will follow the most favorable rate, distribute the shows during the day and will not go beyond the budget.

Test Your Personal Page Ad Format

On April 21, 2020, VKontakte announced that it was starting to test the format of ads - "Advertising of a personal page." The function is suitable for who promotes a personal brand. For example, bloggers will be able to tell why their lives are interesting to follow, experts will easily distribute articles with a thorough analysis of trends, and celebrities will find fans using advertising tools.

The presented format allows you to promote not only your profile, but also individual records from it. The advertiser can choose where to show the ad: in the desktop version of VKontakte or on mobile devices. In addition, all targeting settings available to other formats in VK can be applied to such ads. At the same time, it will not be possible to promote business from a personal page - for this you need to use the Business Page.

The announcement of the appeared format will be displayed in the news feed - and will be similar to a regular post, which, when pressed, will redirect to the specified personal page. Advertisers can set payment for either profile transitions or 1,000 impressions. The ad record participates in a general auction with other ads in the feed. VKontakte will collect feedback from advertisers in order to develop the tool taking into account their wishes.

Historically, bloggers and stars, along with business representatives, created communities. But in some cases, we see a need to promote personal pages - for example, they are often used to build a personal brand when they want to separate themselves from a common project. At the same time, communities are best suited for business development: they provide huge opportunities for promotion, communication with customers and ordering, said Svetlana Chernikova, Head of Internal Marketing VKontakte for Business

I like that the platform is following the path of supporting content creators. Now it will be even easier for the audience to talk about their work, shared by Alexander Revva, showman

Over the past years, I have really lacked the tools to promote a personal page. I always saved myself by leading and promoting the community, but I wanted to be closer to my listeners. This barrier has been removed, and I will be able to make promos to my personal page: communicate even more with my subscribers and talk about creative plans and releases, noted Julianna Karaulova, singer

Earlier, VKontakte announced an approach to verifying profiles and communities. The check mark has ceased to be a symbol of particular popularity. It only means that the page is maintained by real representatives, not fans or attackers. Thanks to this change, more talented authors, business representatives and opinion leaders get the tick, and it is easier for users to distinguish official representative offices from the creativity of fans or other similar pages.

Launch Ad Format - Promote Gadgets

On April 14, 2020, VKontakte reported that a format for promoting mini-applications appeared in the VKontakte advertising office, thanks to which you can attract traffic to services directly in the news feed. At the same time, ads that lead to the project from the catalog and are posted by someone from the administration of the mini-application will receive an additional 30% to the auction rate - this means that they will be shown more often.

To create an advertisement for a widget, you do not need the VKontakte community: just add a link to the service and issue an advertisement. You can choose where to show ads: in the desktop version of VKontakte or on mobile devices. In addition, all targeting settings available to other formats in VK can be applied to such ads.

The announcement of the mini-application will appear in the news feed - and will look like a regular post, which, when you click on any recording area, will redirect to the service. Advertisers can set payment either for transitions to the widget or for 1000 impressions. The ad record participates in a general auction with other ads in the feed.

Mini-applications allow a business to implement any necessary functionality and attract the attention of the audience. There are already 15 thousand services on our platform for April 2020 - to find more customers, it is important to promote your mini-application. Therefore, we launched the next format of ads, and also offered an action: if advertising leads to the service from the catalog, and someone from the administration of the mini-application places it, then we will add 30% to the rate of the announcement at the auction. This means that it will receive more views and transitions for less money, said Anton Tsivarev, platform manager for VKontakte developers

Widgets that have been moderated and tested fall into the catalog. It is available in the "Services" section of the VK mobile application.

During the period of self-isolation, users who access mini-applications every day increased by 260% compared to March 2020, and those who search for services in the catalog - by 120%. The record for the monthly audience of the VK Mini Apps platform was also broken - in March 2020, this figure exceeded 27 million people.

2-fold increase in SMB promotion budget

On March 26, 2020, Mail.ru Group announced the allocation of a billion rubles to support medium and small businesses. VKontakte will double the budget for the promotion of small and medium-sized businesses: in mobile advertising cabinets. Read more here.

2019

Seamless integration of the VKontakte music ecosystem with the Combo service

On December 25, 2019, Mail.ru Group announced that the Combo subscription service has expanded the list of offers within the existing package through music content. Combo users will have access to VKontakte music and in the BOOM app without ads, with the ability to listen offline, as well as in the background. Read more here.

Plan to create a "super application" based on "VKontakte"

According to RBC on October 25, 2019, in the coming years Mail.Ru Group intends to launch super applications that should meet the basic needs of the user. Such a business model is already being developed by Chinese companies and are trying to apply in the United States and Russia.

Mail.Ru Group intends to develop its own superapps (Super App, super application).

{{quote 'We believe that VKontakte has every prospect of becoming a superapp. The development of superapps based on our ecosystem, payment systems and other related products will be the biggest priority for the next three years, "Mail.Ru Group said in a statement to RBC. }}

Superapp is an application that combines many functions and allows a person on one screen to meet various needs: in communication, entertainment, financial business. The first such services appeared in, China this is a developed - IT holding Tencent messenger WeChat and service from. AliPay These Alibaba Group applications combine, for example, functions:

• messengers;
• social media;
• online trading;
• ordering food and taxis;
• currency exchange, insurance, etc.

According to information on the Alipay website, 1 billion users are connected to the system as of October 2019. WeChat, according to the Statista service, has more than 1.1 billion monthly active users.

Companies around the world are trying to repeat the success of Chinese super applications. For example, in Indonesia there is a Gojek application, through which you can buy goods, order taxis, watch videos, make money transfers - get only about 20 services. U.S. Uber Technologies is also trying to position itself as more than a ride-hailing app. In some countries, the company has food delivery services, bike rental, job search.

We want Uber to be the operating system for your daily life, said executive director Dara Khosrowshahi

Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg also announced plans to turn his social network into a superapp.

According to Anton Tsivarev, head of the VKontakte developer platform, as early as October 2019, through the VKontakte application, you can order a taxi and food delivery, see the weather forecast, buy clothes or air tickets, and find a job.

In fact, VKontakte is a superapp when we close many needs within one product at once, connect business and users on the same platform, "he explained.

In February, the social network began integration with an online platform. trade AliExpress Social network users gained access to the assortment of the marketplace and the ability to make purchases without leaving the application using the online payment service VK Pay. Then a RBC source close to Mail.Ru Group said that VKontakte is creating a single ecosystem that will allow the user to perform all the necessary actions without leaving the account, and will increase the time that the audience spends on the social network^[3]

Launch oCPM Ad Payment Model

On October 15, 2019, VKontakte announced that it was launching an advertising payment model - oCPM (optimized display fees). It is suitable for all businesses that collect applications, and will allow you to spend the advertising budget more efficiently. It is enough to enter the desired cost of the lead - the algorithm will show the announcement to the users who are most likely to fill out the questionnaire, and at the same time meet the specified price of the application.

The oCPM model is available in the Collection of Applications format. Unlike the payment for a thousand impressions (CPM) model, it optimizes the display of ads for the purpose of the advertiser - to receive an application within the selected cost.

Thanks to oCPM, entrepreneurs can spend the advertising budget more economically. For example, as part of the experiment, real estate representatives placed ads on the oCPM model - and the cost of the application decreased by an average of 40% compared to other payment models.

{{quote 'author = noted Alexandra Cherkas, evangelist of VKontakte for business' The oSRM model will be useful to all businesses that generate leads. For example, it can be used to collect contacts of potential buyers of apartments, record on test drives, master classes or trial classes, register at a conference, pre-order new products, offer discounts on visiting a restaurant or cafe. It is important to adhere to the correct advertising procurement strategy. Many first indicate a small desired bet, and then increase it. We recommend doing the opposite: at the start, set the maximum permissible cost of the application - and lower it when the algorithm is trained. So he can accumulate more data to optimize advertising, }}

Launch the collection of retargeting audiences through QR codes

On October 1, 2019, VKontakte announced the launch of the collection of retargeting audiences through QR codes.

The update will help the business continue to communicate with customers online.

VKontakte can now show ads to users who have scanned the QR code. To set up such retargeting, you need a special QR code - it can only be created in the VK advertising office.

This will help the business continue to communicate with visitors to events or points of sale, as well as understand how specific offline platforms are suitable for advertising purposes. At the same time, advertisers see only the number of people who have scanned the QR code - all information about users is impersonal.

Previously, in order to continue interacting with a visitor on social networks, you had to ask him to subscribe to the community. As a result, customers were simply lost - after all, the name or link had to be typed manually. QR codes made it possible to go to the page faster and more convenient. The innovation gives the business a second chance: if the visitor is not immediately interested in the page, you can try to attract his attention again - to offer a discount, show the collection, ask to leave a review, said Alexandra Cherkas, VKontakte evangelist for business

Interactive News Feed Ads

On September 30, 2019, VKontakte announced that it had launched an updated promotion format on mobile devices - interactive advertising in the news feed . These are HTML5-based advertising recordings that allow companies to implement the boldest creative ideas, as well as send users to the community, chat bot correspondence, another page on VK or an external site.

According to the company, a non-standard announcement increases the memorability of the brand, as well as the involvement and loyalty of the audience. This shows the results of the first ad campaign of the updated format, which VK conducted with Delivery Club. According to the plot of the game, the user, as a courier, overcomes obstacles to deliver food as quickly as possible. Everyone who completes the task receives a unique set of stickers and a discount promotional code from the community chatbot.

According to statistics for September 2019, users are 3 times more likely to click on an ad than the average for promo posts. Players spend an average of 97 seconds in a mini-application - this is several times more than usual contact with video advertising.

Brands are finding it more and more difficult to fight for the attention of the audience, especially mobile. Advertising with game mechanics in the news feed - the most visited section of the mobile application - is the best option. It increases brand awareness and highlights the ad not only among competitors' offerings, but also among the records of ordinary users. told Tatyana Kashchenko, head of VKontakte client service

Couriers have become symbols of urban life and heroes that we face every day. Being in the place of a delivery employee in a playful form is an interesting experience for the user, a non-standard situation that attracts attention and causes positive emotions. Already during the testing of advertising, we noted a very high interest in the format of the game, an increase in the number of subscribers in our VKontakte community and an increase in the number of orders - using a discount promotional code. told Oleg Khaustov, Marketing Director of Delivery Club

Launch updated community statistics

On July 24, 2019, the VKontakte social network announced the launch of updated community statistics and added performance indicators - the number of new dialogs, clicks on the phone number and opening community applications. In addition, now you can see the number of visits to the website of your company. This data will be displayed in a block with useful user actions.

In statistics, a tab with an overview of the main events in the community has become available. It will be easier for public owners to track user activity - all important data is collected in one place. The overview is presented in the form of cards, each of them is clickable and leads to the corresponding graph inside the statistics. You can select the period for which the data is needed - from 2 to 180 days. For each indicator there are two numbers: absolute and relative - in comparison with the previous period.

The review includes key indicators that make it possible to assess the work of the community. For example, attendance and new subscribers. According to VK Business, these metrics are the most important for 40% of Business Pages owners. You can also see the coverage of publications, the number of new likes, comments, clicks on the "action buttons" and other useful data.

In order to understand what changes are taking place in the public, earlier it was necessary to go through all sections of statistics and selectively look at the graphs. This takes a lot of time and requires special knowledge. A visual overview with all the important numbers in one place will make it much easier to monitor user activity. To the owners of the Business Pages, these indicators give a more complete understanding of the target audience. Track leads' actions to make offers attractive and increase ad efficiency,

Launch of a VKontakte taxi based on the VK Mini Apps platform

On June 21, 2019, the company Citymobil announced that it had launched based on the taxi VKontakte platform. VK Mini Apps Taxi can be ordered and paid in, social network as well as divide the cost of the trip and choose the addresses specified in the VKontakte communities as the destination. Residents will be able to take part in testing,, and. Moscow Samara Togliatti Yaroslavl More. here

Launch of advertising stories

On February 12, 2019, VKontakte announced the launch. advertizing stories For advertising in Stories, the same targeting settings apply as for advertising records and text and graphic blocks: for example, gender, age or geolocation. The number of promotions a user will see depends on how many regular stories they watched in a row and how much time they spent on it. Thus, advertising will not be intrusive and will not cause rejection among viewers.

According to the company, this format of ads "advertising in Stories" will allow businesses to attract even more attention to their goods and services. Thanks to promotions, advertisers will have creative opportunities, and call-to-action buttons will give additional conversion to the main campaigns.

VKontakte users every day create and view more and more stories. This is especially true for a young audience, to reach which with promotions will be more effective than with the help of most traditional formats. Such ads occupy 100% of the screen, smartphone which means they attract more attention. It is important to remember this and create creatives that will organically involve users in communication, and not cause a desire to interrupt viewing. Both large and small companies can effectively use advertising stories for different tasks, combining them with other formats. This is an opportunity to engage customers in communication with the brand, and growth, and sales additional motivation of users to perform actions valuable to the business. Irina Rumyantseva, Director of Advertising Product and Advertising Monetization VKontakte

From February 2019, advertising in VKontakte Stories will be available to everyone. Previously, it was able to try out several advertisers who shared the test results.

This advertising format received a response from the audience - users do not expect to meet it in the Stories feed and, having seen the post, do not perceive it as advertising, therefore they pay maximum attention to it. So we do not overload the user with information, but provide it in sufficient volume for primary interest in the product. German Ermolaev, managing partner of SMM-agency SMMashing Media

2018

Revenue reached 18,431 million rubles

On March 1, 2019, Internet the holding Mail.Ru Group announced that social networks VKontakte's revenue for four years had quadrupled and amounted to 18,431 million at the end of 2018. rubles According to Mail.Ru Group, VKontakte has significant opportunities for further development and will be able to once again double revenue in the next 3-4 years. In 2019, VKontakte will conduct a number of integrations in the region. e-commerce Tools will be available to users, thought leaders, communities and sellers to buy and sell items through. Internet It is also planned to develop functionality QR codes using a platform for small and medium-sized businesses.

Site# 2 in Russia

Launch the Site Ads format in the News Feed

On December 5, 2018, VKontakte for Business announced the launch of an advertising format - "Site Advertising." According to the company, you can attract traffic to the site right in the news feed. At the same time, the VKontakte community will not be needed to create an ad.

The main difference from the existing TGB format (text-graphic blocks) is that this will allow advertisers to choose any platform for displaying the ad - the full and mobile versions of the site, as well as mobile applications. Users will be able to see "Site Advertising" in the news feed, on the walls of communities and on external resources included in the VKontakte advertising network.

The format looks like part of a news feed - the ad does not differ from the usual post, except for the inscription "Site Advertising" under the title. The transition is carried out by clicking on any area of ​ ​ the record.

VKontakte has a variety of advertising formats available for solving advertisers' problems. For example, the most popular promopost format for December 2018 allows you to continue communication with a potential client and implement his requests directly on the social network. But sometimes it is important for advertisers to attract visitors to an external site. Now for this, TGB ads are actively used, which users see on the web version of VKontakte. The "Site Ads" format will allow advertisers to receive traffic from the news feed, and users will see ads on all platforms. Irina Rumyantseva, Director of Advertising Product and Advertising Monetization VKontakte

VKontakte refused to cooperate with NBCH

The largest social network in Russia will not cooperate with the National Bureau of Credit Histories (NBCH), that is, transmit information about users to it, TASS reported in May 2018.

The NBCH provides information about individuals, including their credit histories, to banks so that they can make decisions on the issuance of loans and other possible transactions on their basis. Earlier, the credit bureau with the help of the Mail.ru Group (owns VKontakte) developed a service for checking the profiles of borrowers in social networks.

The court banned third-party companies from using VKontakte user data

In Moscow, the Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal in January 2018 satisfied the requirements of the VKontakte social network regarding the ban on the use of data from its users. The defendant in the case was LLC Double (operates under the Double Data brand). The plaintiff was refused to recover symbolic compensation of 1 ruble. This was reported by the press service of the Skolkovo Foundation, whose resident is Double^[4]

VKontakte sued Double in January 2017. Representatives of the social network demanded to prohibit Double from using the data of its users, such as surnames, names, places of work and study, etc., for commercial purposes. In particular, Double sold the collected data to banks that used the information received to assess the creditworthiness of customers.

In addition, representatives of VKontakte indicated that information about users was aggregated into an automated database, the creation of which required financial and time costs, and therefore the company should have the exclusive right to allow or prohibit third parties to extract materials from this database and use them in any form.

According to representatives of Double, the company used its own software to collect data, and all information was taken from open sources.

Inclusion in the list of the largest pirated sites

The social network VKontakte was included in the updated list of the 25 largest pirated sites compiled by the US Department of Commerce. In addition to the social network, the list also includes such Russian projects as Rutracker, Rapidgator and kinogo, Interfax reported in January 2018.

It is noteworthy that VKontakte is not the first time on the black list of the American ministry. At the same time, in its report, the department said: "VKontakte reports that the company is taking steps to combat piracy inspire hope."

Nevertheless, so far, despite the presence of partnership agreements with the social network with three international copyright holders of music products - Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, the rights of other copyright holders continue to be violated.

Inclusion in the list, however, does not imply the application of any sanctions to sites. The list was formed in order to inform about the problem of piracy on the Internet.^[5]

2017

"Vkontakte" will close the Kyiv office

The management of "Vkontakte" decided to close the Kyiv office of the social network and transfer some of the employees to Moscow. About this with reference to unnamed sources writes vc.ru.

The official representative of VKontakte, Yevgeny Krasnikov, could not confirm this information.

VKontakte opened a Ukrainian office in 2012. The news of the closure of the Vkontakte office appeared the day after the searches in the Ukrainian offices of Yandex. The search engine was suspected of treason. According to the SBU, he was collecting data on Ukrainians, which were then transferred to the Russian special services.

See also Sanctions of Ukraine against Russia.

Falling under Ukrainian sanctions

On May 16, 2017, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, by his decree, enacted the decision of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) on sanctions against Russian companies and their subsidiaries in Ukraine. In total, 468 legal entities were on the sanctions list, of which 81 were related to the IT sphere. Among the companies that fell under the sanctions were also the Russian and Ukrainian legal entities VKontakte. Read more here.

Vkontakte paid hackers $148 thousand

VKontakte announced in May 2017 that over two years of participation in the vulnerability search program, the HackerOne social network paid over $148 thousand 292 to specialists who information security reported the discovery of technical vulnerabilities in the company's services and official mobile applications.

In total, since May 2015, VKontakte has received over 3,000 reports - 385 of them were useful and therefore their authors received a reward. The amount of the reward is directly proportional to the severity of the vulnerability, the minimum reward is $100. The payment is made only to the first researcher who reported the error. Exploitation of vulnerabilities against Vkontakte users entails a complete refusal to pay.

Money Transfer Service

Vkontakte announced in March the launch of a money transfer service for groups, public pages and events through community messages. To send funds, you need to open a dialogue with the community, select the "Money" item in the attachment menu, enter the amount and confirm the transfer.

Community administrators and editors can accept the translation. Translation history is available in community management. As in the case of money transfers to users, when sending money from Mastercard and Maestro cards, the commission is not charged, and for Visa cards the commission is 1%, at least 40 rubles.

VKontakte launched money transfers between users in September 2016. You can send a transfer from Mastercard, Maestro and Visa cards of Russian banks, get - to Russia issued to Mastercard, Maestro and Visa cards, as well as to Mastercard and Maestro cards issued in Azerbaijan, Armenia Belarus,,,,,,,, Lithuania, Germany Georgia Israel Italy Kazakhstan Latvia Moldova,,,,, and Romania Uzbekistan To Ukraine Estonia. France Czech Republic

MS Office Document Viewer

VKontakte announced in March that users of the social network can preview Microsoft Office documents in text (*.doc and *.docx), table (*.xls and *.xlsx) and presentation (*.ppt and *.pptx) formats. As CNews was told in the company, files do not need to be downloaded to the device: when you click, the document will open in a new browser window or in the VKontakte application.

Preview of documents works both in the web version of VKontakte and in applications. In the future, users will have access to editing Microsoft Office files directly on the social network.

The Documents service appeared on VKontakte in 2011. All files that are downloaded by VKontakte users through the Documents service are marked as "personal" by default, that is, they are not displayed in search results. Using privacy settings, users decide for themselves who can see the documents they have downloaded.

2016

The company unveiled a Snapster photo app in July 2015 that resembles Instagram. Also, VKontakte began testing live video broadcasts based on Pladform with the participation of celebrities.

In the fall of 2016, the social network launched a money transfer service implemented in personal messages of users, and a little earlier, in the summer, the site completely moved to a new design.

The US Trade Mission again included VKontakte in the list of pirated sites

The US Trade Office included the VKontakte social network in the list of sites with pirated content for 2016. At the same time, the department positively assessed the actions that the leadership of the social network is taking to combat piracy, writes RNS.

In particular, the conclusion of licensing agreements with recording studios, the introduction of technologies for content recognition, is positively assessed. Another measure to combat piracy was the fight against programs for illegal media downloads.

"Despite the positive

signals, VK reportedly remains a platform for illegal activities, which is why it remained in the updated version of the list," the trade mission quoted the publication as saying.

The social network itself expects that in 2017 the resource will be excluded from the "black" list of the American department.

"During 2016, agreements were signed with the world's largest copyright holders of music products: Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music, The Orchard, Merlin Network, Believe Digital, etc. In August 2016, after two years of absence, the music section returned to the VK App for iOS. Next year, we will continue to work on signing agreements with copyright holders who have not been captured by previous agreements, "representatives of VKontakte said.

It is noted that the list of sites with pirated content, annually updated by the US trade mission, does not formally affect the operation of resources, but can negatively affect the reputation of brands. In addition to VKontakte, the list includes torrent trackers, sites for downloading books and music, etc.

Two out of three residents of Russian cities use VKontakte

According to Mediascope's updated Web Index for cities of 100 thousand +, more than 65% of residents of Russian cities use ^[6]. At the same time, almost 40% of the audience prefers a mobile application as the main way to access the social network every day.

The expansion of the audience measurement of Web Index mobile applications in cities with a population of 100-700K + thousand led to an increase in the indicators of the measured audience of the OK application by almost 3 times, from 3 to 8.8 million. The combined measured audience of the desktop version of OK and mobile applications has grown 2.5 times. At the same time, the number of users of the mobile application of the social network in 100-699K cities is almost twice as high as in 700K + cities. Every second resident of these cities enters OK at least once a month.

Social network without court decisions transfers data on users to special services

On June 6, 2016, information about the interaction of the VKontakte social network with law enforcement agencies was confirmed at the first request of the latter^[7].

The press secretary of the social network Yevgeny Krasnikov sees nothing wrong with transferring correspondence to the special services without a court decision. He fully supports the initiative to transfer any information about users of the social network to the special services without a court decision.

While the FBI is suing Apple for refusing to provide access to an encrypted iPhone, the Russian social network Vkontakte transmits all information about its users at the first request of the special services. This was proudly stated by the press secretary of the social network Yevgeny Krasnikov at a forum in Kazan.

I would very much like to hope that our law enforcement agencies and law enforcement agencies, which have the opportunity to receive any personal information of our users, do this for the benefit and protection of our country, if the drain of such correspondence helped to prevent serious consequences, terrorist attacks, then it may be for the better. Evgeny Krasnikov, head of the VKontakte press service

2015: Durov gains full control over the management of VKontakte

As Forbes wrote in April 2015, the Internet company Mail.ru Group handed over to General Director and Founder of VKontakte Pavel Durov a power of attorney for voting in a package of shares in the social network owned by the holding. This is stated in the press release of the Mail.ru Group, distributed on May 28, 2015.

I am glad that at this stage of our relationship we managed to find a form of interaction, "comfortable for both Mail.ru Group and VKontakte. In the long term, both sides and the entire Russian segment of the Internet will benefit from our agreements, - the words of Dmitry Grishin, CEO of Mail.ru Group, are quoted in a press release.

"Mail.ru Group and VKontakte, while remaining independent in managing companies, have a number of common problems and tasks that need to be solved together. In practice, this can lead to an acceleration of the technological development of Russian companies and an improvement in the user experience of the Russian audience, "Durov said for his part^[8]

.

From now on, Pavel Durov will actually make sole decisions on managing the largest Russian social network. At the same time, he has already stated that in the near future he is not going to bring VKontakte to the stock exchange.

"IPO Facebook destroyed the faith of many private investors in social networks, and the VK IPO was postponed indefinitely," Durov replied to a journalist's question on Twitter.

2014

60.2 million users per day

The daily number of visitors to the VKontakte social network reached a record high of 60.2 million users on January 20, 2014, follows from the statistics of the LiveInternet resource.

In January 2013, the average daily number of visitors to VKontakte was about 44 million. To date, this figure has grown by more than a third. At the same time, the number of views per visitor decreased from 63 to 53. The average viewing time for the year decreased slightly - from 13 to 12 minutes.

Revenue growth of 6.2%

VKontakte LLC received a net profit of 709 million rubles. in 2014, which is 15 times more than in 2013 (46 million rubles), Interfax reported with reference to the companies' reports on RAS^[9].

The net profit of VKontakte is 13 times less than that of a competitor's social network.

VKontakte's revenue increased by 6.2%, to 6.2 billion rubles, according to data on RAS (early data IFRS on indicated that the social network earned only 4.3 billion in 2014). rubles

In the fourth quarter of 2014, revenues of the social network increased by 22.6% to 1,348 million rubles.

Pavel Durov sold all his shares in Vkontakte to the general director of Megafon

On January 24, 2014, the founder and general director of Vkontakte, Pavel Durov, announced on his social network page that he had sold his stake in the company to the general director of Megafon, Ivan Tavrin^[10]

Thus, after the completion of the transaction, 40% of Vkontakte will belong to the Mail.ru Group, 48% to the Ilya Sherbovich fund United Capital Partners, and another 12% to Ivan Tavrin, who heads Megafon.

It is important to know that the controlling shareholder of Mail.ru Group - Alisher Usmanov - is also the main owner of Megafon. Ivan Tavrin, to whom Pavel Durov sold his stake, is Usmanov's partner in the UTV media holding, which unites the U, Muz-TV and Disney TV channels. The total share of Tavrin and Mail.ru Group in the social network is 52%, thus, now Usmanov indirectly gained control over Vkontakte.

The total share of VKontakte owned by Mail.Ru Group amounted to 100%

Mail.Ru Group Limited announced in September 2014 the acquisition of 48.01% of VK.Com Limited (VKontakte). The 48.01% acquisition was completed on 16 September 2014. The stakes were acquired from Blesmir Development Limited and Palagon Limited. As a result, the total share of VKontakte owned by Mail.Ru Group amounted to 100%. Accordingly, Mail.Ru Group consolidates VKontakte in the financial statements.

The acquisition of 48.01% was fully paid in cash in the amount of $1.47 billion. Taking into account the amount paid for the remaining 52% of VKontakte since the first investment in 2007, the total cost of acquiring VKontakte amounted to $2.07 billion. Mail.Ru Group paid for the transaction with cash in the company's accounts, as well as a loan of 22.2 billion rubles. ($585 million at the exchange rate of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation), provided by Gazprombank for 4 years at 11.5% per annum. UCP, Mail.Ru Group and Pavel Durov also came to an agreement that simultaneously with the acquisition, all pending lawsuits will be immediately terminated, and claims against VKontakte and related issues will be removed.

In 2013, VKontakte's revenue grew by 14%, amounting to 3.8 billion rubles, EBITDA grew by 32%, amounting to 1 billion rubles, and net profit amounted to 53 million rubles. In the first half of 2014, VKontakte's income amounted to 2.0 billion rubles, EBITDA - 694 million rubles, net profit - 248 million rubles.

Consolidation of VKontakte is due strategically: VKontakte with more than 92 million MAU (comScore, the whole world, July 2014) corresponds to the portfolio of Mail.Ru Group.

2013

Revenue growth by 15%, Loss of 137 million rubles

Mail.ru Group disclosed in the spring of 2014 the financial performance of some of its assets. In particular, it turned out that the social network VKontakte (Mail.ru Group owns 52% of the shares in it (as of April 2014)) has been causing losses for two years. In 2012, net loss amounted to 210 million rubles, in 2013 it decreased by 30% to 137 million rubles. At the same time, the revenue of the social network in 2013 increased by 15% to 3.83 billion rubles.

VKontakte never disclosed its financial indicators. But from the materials of the Mail.ru Group it followed that in 2008 the social network made a net profit, and continued to be profitable until 2011 inclusive.

Mirilashvili and Leviyev sell UCP 48% on VKontakte

On April 17, 2013, it became known that the United Capital Partners (UCP) fund acquired a 48% stake in the VKontakte network, the fund told CNews. 40% of the shares were sold by the co-founder of the network Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and his father, the famous St. Petersburg entrepreneur Mikhail Mirilashvili (owns the St. Petersburg group of companies "Conti"). Another 8% was sold by the executive director of VKontakte Lev Leviyev.

Thus, UCP became the largest shareholder of VKontakte. 40% of the network's shares belong to the Mail.ru Group holding, 12% to the general director of VKontakte Pavel Durov. At the same time, Durov also manages the share of Mail.ru Group.

The amount of the transaction was not disclosed. The last deal, which was carried out by the Mail.ru Group with Vkontakte shares, took place in the summer of 2011. Then the entire network was valued at $1.4 billion. Based on this estimate, the amount of the current transaction could be about $700 million.

The Vkontakte shareholder agreement provided for the pre-emptive right of existing shareholders to buy out shares in the company, a source among shareholders told CNews. Notification of the upcoming deal was not sent to the shareholders, but it will still be difficult to challenge the sale, says the source of CNews: most likely, the shares in VKontakte were not sold directly, but together with the corresponding offshore companies^[11].

2012

Loss amounted to 210 million rubles

Since 2012, the social network has been influenced by adopted laws aimed at regulating the Internet space. VKontakte was mistakenly blocked by Roskomnadzor, and because of the first version of the anti-piracy law, the site administration purged the content. Subsequently, the activities of the social network more than once raised a question from the fighters for legal content.

The United States called on to deal with piracy on the social network "VKontakte"

The USA accused the Russian social network "Vkontakte" of ensuring access to intellectual property without the permission of owners. The RBC agency with reference to the statement of the representative of the USA at trade negotiations Ron Kirk reported about it. to the "pri­nya­tiyu of so­ot­vet­stvu­yu­shchikh Measures" Kirk pri­zval ros­sy­skoye pra­vi­tel­stvo, led by Dmityoriyoem Medvedev.

It is not the first case of recognition of Vkontakte contributing to the development of piracy. So, in in November, 2010 the Vkontakte social network was included in the black list of illegal distributors of music made by the American association of the companies of the sound recording industry, reminded the agency.

2011

In the third quarter of 2011, Vkontakte earned about 550 million rubles from advertising, its deputy general director Ilya Perekopsky told Vedomosti^[12].

• The Belarusian KGB began arresting administrators of current opposition groups on the Vkontakte social network. Three people have already been detained. All of them were administrators of groups in which citizens of the country discussed future protests, according to the Russian News Service.

• In August 2011, it became known that the increase in the share of Mail.ru Group in Vkontakte to 39.99% took place at the expense of the founder of the social network Pavel Durov, JPMorgan reported. And the largest shareholder of Vkontakte remains Vyacheslav Mirilashvili^[13].

JPMorgan's report describes Vkontakte's shareholder structure upon completion of the Mail.ru Group transaction. Now Mail.ru Group owns 39.99% of the social network, and the remaining 60% is divided between its founder Pavel Durov (12%), his partner Lev Leviyev (8%) and the Mirilashvili family (40%). A source close to the shareholders of Vkontakte clarifies: Mirilashvili has 42%, and Leviyev has 6%. This was confirmed by a businessman familiar with them. The economic shares of shareholders coincide with the voting ones.

According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, in 2007 (the year Vkontakte was founded) Vyacheslav Mirilashvili owned 60%, his grandfather Mikhail - 10%, Leviyev - 10%, and Durov - 20%. Since then, both Mirilashvili have sold 30% to Mail.ru Group, Leviyev - 4%, and Durov - 8%. Now the entire package of the Mirilashvili family is in the hands of Vyacheslav, two sources close to the shareholders of Vkontakte say.

In July 2011, Mail.ru Group announced that it had exercised the last of the options for the purchase of a stake in Vkontakte - it acquired 7.44% for $111.7 million. On the day of the announcement of the deal, Durov posted on the Instagram social network his photo with an indecent gesture, signing it: "The official response to the trash holding Mail.ru to absorb Vkontakte for his next attempts. Durov did not explain to Vedomosti the motives for such an act.

But back in February 2011, CEO Mail.ru Group Dmitry Grishin said in an interview with Forbes that it would be strategically right to control Vkontakte. Investment banks - the organizers IPO of the Mail.ru Group (held in November 2010) warned: being independent, Vkontakte will take away the audience from the social networks controlled by Mail.ru Group "" and Schoolmates"My мир@Mail.ru." This is what happened, according to a recent report by Bank of America. But Durov immediately said: Mail.ru Group has nothing to count on for control in Vkontakte. Moreover, a photo of a dining entrepreneur showing his middle finger to the camera appeared on Instagram. The picture was accompanied by the caption: "The official response to the trash holding Mail.ru to absorb VKontakte for its next attempts.

Contract with IMHO VI for the sale of ads in applications

In November 2011, it became known that the social network Vkontakte signed a contract for the sale of advertising in applications with IMHO VI. This can bring the network up to 1 billion rubles. in 2012^[12].

Vkontakte announced that it is introducing a centralized advertising sales system in applications posted on the network (games, tests, training programs, etc.). Their developers will be able to connect two types of media ads through a single software interface - banners that appear when the application is downloaded (preloaders), and banners inside applications. The advertising agency IMHO VI will sell preloaders, which "distributes the largest volumes of advertising budgets of television advertisers," the social network reports. Vkontakte also wants to sell ads inside applications with the participation of IMHO VI, although not only it.

Preloader is a format from which users literally cannot take their eyes off, since such ads cannot be "scrolled," explains a source in IMHO VI. Therefore, the CTR (percentage of clicks on a link) of such ads is 1%, 10 times higher than that of banners.

The scope of the contract "Vkontakte" and IMHO VI is not called. Two sources in advertising agencies heard that in 2012 IMHO VI wants to sell advertising worth 1 billion rubles in Vkontakte.

It was possible to advertise in applications before, but this was done by third-party agencies; neither the social network nor the developers made much money on this, explains Maria Chernitskaya, general director of the advertising agency IContext. "In contact" it is more profitable to regulate this business and take control of all flows, she agrees.

The IMHO VI contract with Vkontakte is one of the largest on the market, comparable to the IMHO VI and Yandex contracts, says Andrey Chernyshov, CEO of AdWatch Isobar Russia. If preloaders can be installed in applications from the top 30 list of this social network, then in terms of the number of shows and income, this type of advertising can be compared with the main pages of the largest Internet portals, he said. Usually the main page provides 30-40% of the portal's revenue from media advertising, estimates a source in an advertising agency.

Refusal to block political opposition

The founder and chief developer of the social network "Vkontakte" posted a photo where he shows the middle finger to the holding Mail.ru. He called this photo an official response to the group's attempt to finally absorb Vkontakte. In addition, in recent days, the network has been actively opposed by the FSB in attempts to close opposition groups.

'"Pavel Durov"', the founder and head of the development departments of the social network Vkontakte"," published through the service Instagram his photo, where he shows the middle finger to the holding. Mail.ru The caption under the picture says that this is "an official response to the thrash holding Mail.ru to its next attempts to absorb Vkontakte.

At the moment, the social network belongs to Mail.ru by 39.9%, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili has a share of 42%, Pavel Durov - 12%, Lev Leviyev - 6%. No information about the possible purchase of Mail.ru additional share has yet been officially received.

In the light of recent events with Vkontakte opposition groups, Pavel Durov's gesture looks perhaps even more widespread. As a user under the nickname "edvvvard" and at the same time the administrator of Alexei Navalny's Vkontakte group ("RosPil - the war of corruption - Alexei Navalny") said in his blog in LiveJournal, the network administration admits that it is under pressure from the special services to close opposition groups.

Recall that the famous blogger and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was arrested during an opposition rally in Moscow on December 5, dedicated to the results of the elections to the State Duma of the Russian Federation. Together with a number of other activists, Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 15 days of arrest. In total, at least 1,000 people were arrested in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the days from December 5 to 7.

Now opposition forces through the Vkontakte social network are preparing an all-Russian protest rally against the election results, which is scheduled for December 10. The RosPil group in the social network consists of about 80 thousand people, there are other groups of a similar orientation.

The user "edvvvard" in his blog writes the following: "In one day alone, the number of supporters of Navalny increased by 10,000 people and new comments began to appear every second. Suddenly, everything was suddenly blocked - it became impossible to publish new posts and add comments on the wall of the group "(author's punctuation saved).

Then he gives screenshots of the correspondence with Pavel Durov, where Pavel reports that the group was temporarily blocked due to exceeding the limit on the number of posts per day (16384), and not at the direction of the authorities. Then the administration of Vkontakte specifically for this group replaced the algorithms, and it restored work. 

In this correspondence, Pavel Durov reports:

"The last

days of the FSB asks us to block opposition groups, I include yours. We fundamentally do not do this. I don't know how it might end for us, but we are worth.'

He further recalls that this has nothing to do with the political convictions of the owners and employees of the social network. Vkontakte is a 100% apolitical company, we do not support either the authorities, the opposition, or any of the parties. My personal political views are libertarian, they don't affect the process.'

2010

• In April, the company launched its own email service. All VKontakte users got the opportunity to register names for profiles of the "vkontakte.ru/имя" type. The Merchant API service was also launched, which allows online stores to connect to the VKontakte payment system. As a result of this, a "Buy VKontakte" button appears under each product name.

• On April 23, the Desktop Apps service was presented, which allows you to create special applications for working with a social network in mobile devices. Third-party developers will be able to offer VKontakte users various applications for mobile platforms, widgets and extensions for web browsers.

• On July 14, 2010, the company announced that it had started open testing of support for the XMPP (Jabber) protocol on its website. This protocol will allow users to exchange instant messages with friends on VKontakte through external instant messengers. The new VKontakte service supports the translation of instant messages through the online electronic translator Google Translate and allows you to view the history of correspondence with all your contacts, which is stored on the social network server. In addition, the user's status in the instance messenger when connecting to the VKontakte Jabber server is automatically published on his page on the social network and can also be broadcast on Twitter. According to representatives of VKontakte, they also plan to launch the S2S function (server2server) after the end of testing the new functionality, which will allow users with accounts on different services to exchange messages with each other. In the future, the social network plans to agree with one of the messenger development companies on the assembly of a special program that will be fully adapted to the needs of our users, says Vladislav Tsyplukhin, a representative of VKontakte.

• VKontakte is the largest social network on the Runet. ACCORDING to TNS as of July 2010, the network had a monthly audience of 19.6 million. As of October 2010, the audience of the resource numbered over 70 million registered users.

• In August 2010, MTS and Vkontakte announced the opening of free access to the mobile portal 0.vkontakte.ru for their users from September 1, which allows you to communicate with your friends for free on the VKontakte social network. The portal 0.vkontakte.ru is optimized for fast page loading via a mobile connection - this is a faster and lighter version of the mobile site m.vkontakte.ru.

The portal 0.vkontakte.ru allows you to use all the features of the mobile version, but at the same time does not display graphics, photos and video files, thanks to which the speed of access to the resource increases significantly. Access to the content posted on the user's pages can be obtained by clicking on a special link, while the user is notified that he leaves the site 0.vkontakte.ru and, accordingly, the free billing zone. When viewing content and clicking on links to other resources, data transmission is paid according to the subscriber's tariff.

Free access to 0.vkontakte.ru is possible only in the "home" region of the subscriber and in intranet roaming. Free access is not supported for Opera Mini and similar browsers that use traffic compression, as well as for subscribers who connect the static IP address service. At the same time, the possibility of using the standard version of "Vkontakte" for mobile devices on the website m.vkontakte.ru with traffic payment in accordance with the terms of the subscriber's tariff remains.

Revenue growth from targeted advertising triples

The revenues of the VKontakte network from targeted advertising during the third quarter of 2010 tripled to one and a half million dollars a month^[14]In total, in the first nine months of 2010, the social network earned $5-6 million from targeted text ads on users' pages. Leviyev explained the growth in revenues by the launch of a new advertising system.

Fin results of the year: revenue growth of 94%

The revenue of the largest Russian social network VKontakte increased by 94% in 2010 to $93.8 million compared to $48.4 million a year earlier, the Internet company Mail.Ru Group, which owns a 32.55% stake in VKontakte, said.

The social network's EBIDTA rose 54.6% to $28.4 million, the company said in its financial statement. The cost of VKontakte Mail.Ru Group, which owns an option to buy an additional 7.5% of the social network until October 2011, is estimated at $1.84 billion.

The social network VKontakte's advertising revenue in 2010 amounted to 1.36 billion rubles. Or 44.8 million dollars. This was reported by the newspaper "" with reference to the words of the executive director of the company Lev Leviyev. Sheets Of these, 450 million rubles. brought targeted contextual advertising, 910 million rubles. - media, data on income from paid services "VKontakte" does not disclose. In 2011, VKontakte plans to abandon the sale of media advertising, focusing on contextual. Nevertheless, the management of the social network plans that the company's revenue will triple this year.

2009

Buying a domain vk.com

The Vkontakte network has acquired a domain name vk.com. The domain was created in June 1997, the last re-registration took place on August 28, 2009. According to the executive director of Vkontakte Lev Leviyev, the company is going to develop abroad and by October 2009 will launch versions of the vk.com site in 12 languages. The combination of VK will become the international brand "Vkontakte," he explained. Leviyev did not name the amount of the transaction.

Former general director of the Russian office of MySpace Alexander Turkot estimates the costs of Vkontakte for the purchase of a domain at several tens of thousands of dollars, director of the coordination center of the domain.ru Andrei Kolesnikov - a maximum of $100,000.

Theft of 135 thousand user passwords

On July 30, 2009, one of the users of the Live Journal website published a link to a text file containing about 135 thousand records in the format "email @ mail: password," which corresponded to accounts on the VKontakte network. On the same day, access to the file on the server was terminated.

Fin results of the year: revenue - 1.094 billion rubles, net profit - 369.3 million rubles

Revenue - 1.094 billion rubles. ($34.5 million), net profit - 369.3 million rubles ($11.6 million) (RAS data^[15]

Vkontakte's net profit margin was 34% in 2009, Lepetukhina calculated. And the operating profitability is 43%, Kochetkov considered.

In 2009, the social network opened the API (application programming interface) for developers and now receives income from their products, although it itself does not invest in development. For example, the developers of the game "Happy Farmer" who earned $20 million in "Vkontakte" gave the social network half of this amount.

As of July 2009, the site has about 38 million registered users.

2008: Revenue of RUR 161 million

2008 - 161 million rubles. ($5 million) revenue and 142.2 million rubles. ($4.5 million) net profit.

The social network is gradually beginning to grow into new functions: anonymous opinions have appeared, the ability to draw "graffiti" on the wall of users, applications, video and audio recordings and other functions.

The VKontakte audience began to grow actively in the early years of its existence, starting to compete with another popular Russian social network - Odnoklassniki. In 2008, according to alexa.com, the network became the most popular Internet resource in Russia and overtook its "red" competitor, and at the end of 2010 the number of users approached 100 million.

2007

In early 2007, VKontakte Limited Liability Company was founded. The founders of the company were Vyacheslav Mirilashvili (60%), his father - entrepreneur Mikhail Mirilashvili (10%), Pavel Durov (20%) and Lev Leviyev (10%). According to Leviyev, it was he who told the future creator of the project about the Western social network Facebook, the concept of which formed the basis of the Russian analogue. The technical director of the portal until 2013 was Durov's brother - Nikolai.

October 10, 2006 - the network's birthday

The date of appearance of the social network coincides with the birthday of the creator of the site Pavel Durov. The site with the address vkontakte.ru, registered on October 1, 2006, received its first functions on October 10, 2006.

He recruited potential VKontakte users Durov at the St. Petersburg State University forum, of which he was the administrator. At the initial stage, students could register in the future global social network only by invitation under real names and surnames. But at the end of November 2006, free registration was opened^[16]

The starting functionality of the project boiled down to creating a profile with information about yourself, replenishing the list of friends, exchanging messages, organizing groups and meetings, as well as uploading photos.

• Social networks (Russian market)
• Social Media (Global Market)

Links

• Video service site "In Frame"
• Site of specialized social network "In the State"
• Social network site on the platform "User API VKontakte" "Дуров.ру"

Notes