Mail.ru

Audience

2012

The service attracts 27.8 million visitors per month. The total audience of Mail.Ru Group is 75.6 million people. The group's services support nine thousand servers. The company has the largest data warehouse in Europe (more than ten petabytes of data are stored).

As for e-mail, more than 400 million accounts are registered, a quarter of which are active. More than 20 million electronic mailboxes are checked daily on Mail.Ru, about 3.5 thousand letters pass through the postal service per second, their "weight" per day reaches 12 terabytes.

According to comScore (February 2012), the most popular email services in the world by daily audience size as of January 2012 are:

• Hotmail, owned by Microsoft,
• Yahoo,
• Gmail.com,
• Mail.ru (12.1 million)
• AOL (10.6 million)
• QQ Mail (10.2m),
• Mail 163 (5.9 million people per day),
• Yandex Mail, (unlike ComScore data (3.9 million), according to TNS estimates in January 2012, the average daily audience of Yandex.Mail was 5.1 million)
• Orange Mail, owned by France Telecom and
• 126.^[1].

Mail.ru remains the only service in the top five that does not provide users with the ability to access the mailbox using the IMAP4 protocol.

Performance indicators

2012

The charts below show the company's position in the Internet search market.

2011

2010

Revenue in 2010 amounted to $226.3 million (includes revenues ICQ). At the same time, the Mail.ru increased indicators not only faster than the market, but also faster than the number of users grew. Therefore, we can talk about more effective monetization of the company's services, in particular social networks.

In 2010, Mail.ru abandoned Yandex search in favor of Google. Kochetkov believes that the growth in income from the context could also be associated with obtaining more favorable conditions from an American company. True, it is unlikely that the partnership with Google was decisive, because the number of search queries Mail.ru decreased over the year, which could not but affect the revenue, notes a top manager of an Internet company. According to Liveinternet, the share of Mail.ru searches for the year fell by 2.5 pp to 7.4%.

According to the calculations of Vedomosti^[2], during the deal to buy out the DST share of Naspers, the entire Mail.ru was valued at $2.25 billion.

Film business

Mail.ru co-produced the film "Viy. Return "along with RospoFilm Group (RFG). The holding invests $5 million in the picture (the total budget is $13-14 million), hoping to raise about $20 million based on the results of the rental. RFG CEO Alexei Petrukhin confirms the amount of $5 million. "We were interested in Mail.ru not only promoting the picture, but also being financially interested in its good fees," he says.

History

1995

USA By Eugene Gauland A company has been created in the Russian emigrant. DataArt He had his hand in the formation of the company and. As Alexey Krivenkov part of DataArt, St. Petersburg programmers wrote a web mail engine, which was originally supposed to be replicated in the West.

1997

Evgeny Goland co-founded the service Mail.ru.

Recalls Alexey Krivenkov, co-founder of Mail.ru (July 2012^[3]: "This story must be counted from 1997. I then worked in the New York office of the software developer DataArt, a small startup with Russian roots, where I was one of the younger partners, as well as an administrator and, in general, as usual, "all at once." We had a small company - something about 20 customers. Just then, the general fashion for "corporate mails" began in business, and we decided to make a system in which it would be convenient to start work mail - something like the current google mail service. I wrote a script on the pearl that allowed one administrator to create many domains and made it possible for admins to create and manage users already inside them. These were the first beginnings of what later transformed into Mail.ru. Soon I had to leave the States. Back in Peter, I went on to work for DataArt - hiring and managing local programmers. In our St. Petersburg office there were really a lot of engineers who objectively were much stronger than me in programming. One of them is Dmitry Andrianov, who in fact, I think, is a brilliant programmer, just at that time began to experiment and add the ability to read mail to the account management interface. It should be noted here that around the same time Microsoft bought Hotmail for some very serious money, and this certainly inspired us. In general, at some point we decided that having an excellent engine, we could well create a service in Russia that represents free mail to everyone. In addition, our good friends owned a domain mail.ru. For us then it was not a business - just a cool thing. But the main owner of DataArt, Evgeny Goland, supported us and offered to try to start. We bought the domain and opened the service in test mode - so far for our own, without any marketing and PR. The same people became shareholders - co-owners of DataArt and several individuals. I managed the project. Quite unexpectedly for everyone, it began to grow rapidly - so much so that the focus of DataArt, which took us under its wing, very quickly moved from supporting American customers to working with Mail.ru. It became obvious that we needed money for development. There were no funds in Russia at that time, so they began to look for investments in the United States - especially since we have been working in this country for a long time. As a result, they collected about a million dollars from funds and private investors - a huge amount at that time. The project developed - less than a year later, we had several tens of thousands of users.

1998

November 1998 - After six months of work, the Russian postal service started working on the engine created by DataArt Mail.ru.

Recalls Alexey Krivenkov, co-founder of Mail.ru (July 2012^[3]: At the beginning of 1998, we went to Moscow (all this time we were sitting in St. Petersburg) - to get acquainted with large Internet companies. There were not many of them then: Rambler, Yandex, Aport, Lenta.ru, Gazeta.ru, a couple more - the market was very small. We wanted to know about us, we even considered the possibility of uniting. The main practical benefits of our trip were agreements with content suppliers - news from Infoart, Lenta.ru Gazeta.ru we have now posted on the main page Mail.ru. And everything is free - at that time no one was selling traffic yet. This move was quite consistent with our strategy - after looking at how Yahoo is developing, we began to build a portal with a bunch of services (news, weather, exchange rates, etc.). But the main product was, of course, mail, and we "raised" it first of all. At the same time, the product has always remained free. In general, the development paradigm was not very difficult. However, it was not very easy either. We had one strong competitor - the company Chat.ru. Moreover, when we came to this market, they already worked there, and felt great. But we worked quite actively with elbows: we experimented with services, tried to distribute our mail in the domains of competitors. We managed to consider the then emerging trend - growing interest in travel, and we bought a stake in Travel.ru. All this worked for us, besides, the Chat guys seemed to underestimate the technological component - they had a reputation for a site that often "falls." By the way, we have a lot of work on this (and it is with technologies that many difficult moments are associated - the number of users grew very quickly) - the company even moved to Moscow from St. Petersburg due to the fact that in the latter we lacked channels. In general, we quickly bypassed competitors. Of course, the right step to allow normal development was to attract investment at an early stage. As I said, advertising on the Runet was not sold - until about 2001 there was a complete calm. Therefore, we did not earn anything, all our efforts were aimed at attracting traffic, which we successfully coped with.

1999: Established by CJSC "Порт.ру"

In April 1999 - established CJSC "Порт.ру"

In August 1999, American private investors represented by Balestra Capital made the first round of investments (900 thousand dollars). DataArt became the general contractor Port.ru. Evgeny Goland received investments in Port.ru and gave them to his own company DataArt.

In September 1999 - the capitalization of Port.ru amounted to 4.6 million dollars.

In the fall of 1999, Port.ru bought a domain Internet.ru. This domain was previously included in the "stop list" of RosNIIROS and at one time, along with other domains from the prohibited list, was put up for auction. Alexey Krivenkov bought the domain from the winner of the auction - the Krasnoyarsk company Maxsoft - for 1 thousand dollars. At this address, it was supposed to create an image for the owner and a key media for the market.

Port.ru paid $50,000 for the Music.ru. The amount is 50 times greater than in the case of Internet.ru. But on the Music.ru there was already a promoted site, which was made by Pavel Khodakov and Sonya Sokolova. 50 thousand went to Rinet Sergey Ryzhkov, who had previously supported the site and was the owner of the domain.

In December 1999, investors allocated another $2.5 million to Port.ru. The company's capitalization reached $27.5 million.

2000

February 2000 - A scandal erupted around Music.ru. The domain name belonged to the Port.ru, who, having decided that it was easier for them to refuse Khodakov-Sokolova's services than to agree on joint project management, decided to do his project at this address, simply removing the "co-owners." The official statement said that after the sale of the "Rinetovskaya" share, the content companies ceased to engage in the site and therefore Port.ru refused their services. The piquancy of the situation was that no agreement was concluded between the Khodakov-Sokolova team and the Port.ru. The team believed that 50 thousand was paid for a quarter of the project. The same amount will be invested in the form of direct investment in the project, after which Port.ru will own 50% plus one share of the project and everyone will live happily ever after. However, Port.ru did not want to invest in the existing team and the existing site. Pavel and Sonya took away the engine and content and went to a new domain Zvuki.ru.

Yevgeny Goland came to Russia. Krivenkov was removed from the position of executive director to development director. His move to New York was promised. He did not go to America, and he never found a common language with Goland.

Spring 2000 - Maria Chernitskaya left the place of Port.ru marketing director and left for DataArt. A significant role was played in this departure by the conflict between Maria and Nikita Korzun, who came to Port.ru after the scandalous break with List.ru and German Klimenko. The questionnaire, which was introduced at one time on the Mail.ru and then made it possible to provide the opportunity for targeted advertising, is the brainchild of Mary.

May 2000 - Port.ru receives a $2.1 million investment from Delta Capital Management. The number of employees reached 150, the number of registered Mail.ru users has already exceeded one million, and this achievement was listed in the Russian Book of Records. At that time, Port.ru already had: Mail.ru, Base.ru, half of Travel.ru, Torg.ru, Postcards.mail.ru, mailings List.mail.ru. The Rating.port.ru rating, Talk.ru forums and an elite catalog were launched Top200.ru. In honor of the first anniversary, a VAZ 21110 car was played among mail users. It was the first car donated by a Russian internet company to its client.

Early summer 2000 - the St. Petersburg Port.ru team, together with DataArt, moved from an expensive office on Fontanka to an even more expensive one at 10 Serpukhovskaya Street, with marble stairs and other attributes of a beautiful life.

July 2000 - News.port.ru opened (editor-in-chief - Andrey Kupryakhin)

August 2000 - Alexey Krivenkov left the company. As Alexey later said, "everything was clear and predictable." Gauland bent his line and made a large Western-type company with departments and a hierarchical management system. Krivenkov, who believed that such an approach would destroy everything in the bud, preferred to take the money due to him as a shareholder and get out of the case. How much Krivenkov received at the exit - almost no one knows. Amounts from 100 thousand to a million dollars are called.

September 2000 - IBM supplies $1 million worth of Port.ru server hardware.

October 2000 - an agreement was concluded with Marat Safin, on whose T-shirt during the competition from now on the Port.ru logo was to flaunt - almost like the legendary Lycos with Anna Kournikova at that time. The contract was concluded for a period of three years, but was terminated ahead of schedule.

Autumn 2000 - Goland is rumoured to have been denied another tranche of investment. Port.ru for the first time I started talking about what needs to be earned. The e-commerce direction, in which there was a project Torg.ru and never opened Optorg.ru, ate up almost half of the "port" budget. Everything was done on a grand scale - engine, standards, all Runet stores under one wing. But no one could figure out how to make money on this. This task was later solved with little blood Yandex"" and, Rambler creating their "Goods" and "Purchases."

Recalls Alexey Krivenkov, co-founder of Mail.ru (July 2012^[3]: Of course, our investors were very experienced and therefore patient people, because they believed that sooner or later in Russia, as in the West, they would buy advertising. They only flinched slightly after the memorable "dot-com bubble" burst. Here we already had to be nervous, but in the end, around this time, we started at least some sales, and investors calmed down somewhat. In general, I believe that our strategy was absolutely correct - yes, there was no money "right now," but the company was growing very rapidly, there were more and more users, and world experience showed that sooner or later our model would bring money. Trying to earn a "penny" in order to somehow monetize the service meant slowing down development. We know examples when our competitors faltered, began to offer paid services, and eventually flew into the pipe. In 2001, when the markets finally began to grow and the company was going to go to a new level, this story ended for me. I had a conflict with other shareholders, and I was removed from the management of the organization. Around the same time, an offer was received from Yuri Milner to merge with his List.ru service (before that, he had merged his first company Netbridge). I did not like this option, so I, taking my share in money, left the project. The rest, I think, everyone knows. If I was asked about what mistakes I made in that first project for me, then I would call conservatism. It would be possible to grow even faster if I took more risks and did not try to insure myself. It was necessary to launch more new products and services and not be afraid to "kill" them, if something did not work out, not be afraid to spend resources on something important. Now I would act like that. But there were mistakes that were difficult for me to influence. With me, for example, we did not have our own team of engineers, which, of course, very slowed down growth. We did all the technical work DataArt. I did not agree with this - in fact, that's why there was a conflict with other shareholders. Why did we eventually manage to make the market leader? We had a beautiful name, convenient service and interface and had no truly powerful competitors - neither Yandex nor Rambler had normal mail for a very long time. And we made a good product and therefore everything was applied by itself. I do not think that this is always the right logic, but it is definitely suitable for new fast-growing segments.

November 2000 - Director of the e-commerce department Andrey Taburinsky and vice president of development Nikita Korzun left the Port.ru with a noisy scandal (the conflict was continued when Andrey Taburinsky took part of the team with him to Arrava, publicly stating that the best experts in the field of e-commerce left Port). The electronic commercial direction on this stalled. And "Port," having shuffled the top management, began to try to collect everything that he gave birth to in a year and a half into a single portal Port.ru.

2001: Port.ru merges with netBridge

February 21, 2001 - on terms of 50-50 Port.ru merges with netBridge, led by Yuri Milner. They said that netBridge still had investor money, which allowed for some more time. Milner, who became the CEO of the combined company, laid off 90% of the staff, leaving only 40 employees in the new company.

After the merger of Port.ru and netBridge, a group of shareholders led by Goland began to move away from this business, and gradually New Century Holdings, Milner and Finger bought out the shares of Goland and his partners.

April 2001 - the Internet.ru closed, was left without a team. Weak attempts to assemble a new team and reopen the publication for various reasons failed. The company was left without netBridge ideologist German Klimenko. He left to make his own portal Rax.ru and took with him part of the company's technical staff. With his departure, the existence of a List.ru and rating became questionable Top.list.ru. The Music.ru team was liquidated, the News.list.ru was closed, for some time the sales department headed by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov and technical support still existed Mail.ru.

September 2001 - The site Internet.ru transferred under the terms of "lease" and independent financing to A.Partners. The 24x7 store was given to "use" in eHouse.

The end of 2001 - it was decided to abandon the development of numerous brands and focus on the most popular - Mail.ru, transferring all projects under it. The general director of the Mail.ru, Dmitry Grishin, became a shareholder Mail.ru.

2003

Mail.ru has two new shareholders - the Oil Concern and Tiger Technologies. After some time, Milner, Finger and Tiger bought out the stakes of New Century Holdings and 'Petroleum'.

2005

Milner and Finger contributed all of their shares to DST, later renamed the Mail.ru Group.

2006

December 2006 - It is announced that Mail.ru has a new shareholder, Naspers.

2007

Naspers acquires 33% in Mail.ru

In January 2007, South African holding Naspers acquired a stake in Mail.ru. As part of the transaction, 30.7% of the company was bought for $165 million 550 million dollars - this amount was estimated by 100% of the Mail.ru during the transaction. Later, in December 2007, Naspers increased its stake, buying another 2.6% Mail.ru for $26 million. During this transaction, the Mail.ru was already valued at $1 billion.

At the end of the year, Mail.ru revenue increased by 90% and amounted to $55.8 million. EBITDA increased by 94% and amounted to $36 million. 68% of revenue Mail.ru amounted to revenues from media advertising. Contextual advertising accounted for 14% of revenue.

Purchase of 30% Mamba.ru from Finam for $18 million

In 2007, Finam sold 30% of the Mamba dating service for $18 million Mail.ru, which was part of the Internet holding DSTUriya Milner.

2008: DST and Naspers buy back 17% of Mail.ru from Tiger Global Management

In December 2008, Digital Sky Technologies (DST) Yuri Milner and Grigory Finger and the South African media holding Naspers bought 17% of the Mail.ru from Tiger Global Management, based on the company's estimate of $1 billion. Sources close to the parties to this transaction told Vedomosti that initially DST and Naspers agreed to buy this share based on the figure of $2 billion, but due to the crisis, the price fell by half.

The daily audience Mail.ru in November 2008, according to TNS, is 6.1 million users.

According to the results of 2008, the company's revenue under US GAAP amounted to $74.6 million. Net profit - $34.3 million. Net profit margin - 46%. EBITdA - 1.004 billion rubles. ($39.2 million), according to Naspers.

2009

From March 2008 to March 2009, Mail.ru revenue - 1.9 billion rubles. ($73 million), EBITdA - 1.004 billion rubles. ($39.2 million), according to Naspers.

According to the TNS Web Index, in June 2009, the monthly audience of the Mail.ru portal was 18.6 million users (2nd place after Yandex).

As of July 2009, the number of servers mail.ru is 2,000. Each year, that number doubles. Mail.ru has one of the largest storage facilities in Europe with a capacity of about 2 petabytes of data.

In the summer of 2009, Mail.ru decided to enter the multiplayer market herself and even made the browser game Crystal of Eternity.

Buying Astrum Online Entertainment

September 2009 - Vedomosti was told about the upcoming merger of Mail.ru with Astrum Online Entertainment by a manager of a computer game company and a source close to one of the DST companies. Negotiations are still underway, but the likelihood of a deal is high, say a manager close to Astrum and two sources among Mail.ru and Astrum shareholders. This is not a takeover of one company by another, but a merger by redistributing the shares of existing co-owners, said one of Vedomosti's interlocutors. The deal is "partly" monetary, says a source close to the shareholders of both companies: South Africa's Naspers, which owns 32% of the Mail.ru, wants DST to offset the erosion of its stake in the combined company. He does not name the amount of the alleged payments.

In addition, the production and distribution of games within one company significantly optimizes costs. Shareholders are counting on the growth of the capitalization of the combined company. The interlocutor of Vedomosti cites as an example the Chinese Internet company and game manufacturer Tencent, which overtook the largest Chinese search engine Baidu in terms of capitalization. About 40% of Tencent's revenue comes from online gaming.

Astrum is a source of monetization for many portals (for example, for Rambler), which, after merging this holding with Mail.ru, may not want to cooperate with their main competitor. Rambler is only important for the quality of games, his representative assures.

In September 2009, the company costs about $0.5 billion, according to the manager of a large investment bank, and Astrum - about $200 million. The top manager of the Internet company estimates Astrum at $300-400 million.

December 1, 2009 Mail.ru became the owner of 100% Astrum Online Entertainment. Astrum shares are partially paid for in Mail.ru shares, partly in cash. The parties did not disclose other details of the deal.

It was decided that the company will operate under the Mail.ru brand, Dmitry Grishin will remain its president and CEO. Igor Matsanyuk, president of Astrum, will receive the post of first vice president of Mail.ru, Vladimir Nikolsky, CEO of Astrum, will take the post of vice president of the company.

Earlier, market participants explained that the idea of ​ ​ combining Mail.ru and Astrum belongs to DST, and Naspers was against diluting its stake in Mail.ru. The South African holding was demanding that the DST compensate for this reduction with money. What will be Naspers' stake in the combined internet company, representatives of Mail.ru do not disclose, but they say that DST will retain control.

According to Dmitry Grishin, online games are one of the most effective methods of monetizing an Internet audience today. He hopes the deal brings significant synergies.

Revenue growth by 66% to $126 million

According to the results of 2009, the company's revenue increased by 66.7% to $126.4 million, EBITDA - by 22.6% to $55.5 million, and EBITDA margin fell by 16.1 percentage points to 43.9%.

Mail.ru CEO Dmitry Grishin explains both revenue growth and a drop in profitability by the fact that since the second quarter of 2009, the company has consolidated the performance of game developer Astrum Online (although Astrum received 100% Mail.ru only in December 2009). Grishin says Astrum accounted for 20-25% of Mail.ru 's 2009 revenue (i.e. $25.3-31.6 million), he does not disclose Astrum's profitability.

Vladislav Kochetkov, chairman of the Finam investment holding, agrees with the explanations of the head of the Mail.ru. The profitability of Russian game developers is traditionally lower than multimedia portals such as Mail.ru or Yandex, it is 30-35%, he says. Companies such as Astrum have high production costs, in addition, when distributing games through several portals, you have to share profits with partners, explains Kochetkov.

About half of the revenue came from paid services (games, dating, downloading content, etc.), advertising brought half, says Grishin.

Participants in the advertising market and analysts interviewed by Vedomosti found it difficult to estimate the share of media and contextual advertising in Mail.ru revenues, but they all agree that the share of media advertising in "advertising" revenue now exceeds 50%. So, in particular, says Elena Krylova, an analyst at iKS Consulting.

Advertising banners in the mail bring Mail.ru a quarter of all revenue: in 2009 - more than $30 million^[4].

Mail.ru revenue in the first quarter of 2009 increased compared to a year ago, according to preliminary data, by about 40% in rubles, says Mail.ru Product Director Oleg Ilyichev. The main page and Mail bring Mail.ru about 40% of advertising revenue, says Alexey Katkov, the company's commercial director.

2010

• February 2010 - Mail.Ru buys 100% of Astrum Nival.

• On July 14, 2010, the South African media holding Naspers Limited and the Russian investment fund Digital Sky Technologies (DST) announced that the fund Myriad International Holdings B.V., a subsidiary of Naspers, would buy 28.7% of DST.

According to a Naspers press release, under the terms of this transaction, the holding will invest $388 million in cash in DST, and will also give a 39.3% stake in Mail.ru. Top Mail.ru managers and other minority shareholders of the company also convert their shares into DST shares. Since DST already owns a controlling stake in Mail.ru, after the transaction with Naspers, the Russian fund will own more than 99.9% of the company.

• On August 19, 2010, Mail.ru CEO Dmitry Grishin announced the update of the portal interface. One advertising banner instead of two, reducing the number of required page reloads. Reducing the number of banners shown is risky. But Grishin is ready to take a chance to attract new users - in his opinion, the runet is far from saturated and the audience of Russian Internet resources can still grow significantly.

For many e-mail users, a significant part of emails is messages from social networks, dating services, microblogs - computer-generated and designed for a previously known set of reactions ("become a friend," "enter a group," "refuse," etc.). In the new Mail.ru interface, you can respond to such messages without opening the letter. You do not need to open the message and in order to view the attached photo or document.

Other changes have emerged. AJAX technology (long used in Google's Gmail mail) allows you to receive new emails without manually reloading the email list page. In addition, the advertising banner at the top of the page disappeared in the mail Mail.ru, only the side one was left. Yes, and it can be made invisible.

As a result of these innovations, the number of displays of advertising banners will decrease. According to representatives of the Mail.ru, when responding to messages from social services and opening attachments without opening a letter, the advertising banner will not be redrawn. At the same time, the prices for advertising, according to Dmitry Grishin, will not be increased. According to Dmitry Grishin, in the future the audience of the Runet will grow significantly. The post office will Mail.ru have twice as many customers, the general director of the company believes. If so, then it makes sense to take risks in the name of attracting them.

2011: Severing relations with Yandex.Money

• On June 1, 2011, it became known that Mail.ru Group step by step refuses to cooperate with its main competitor, Yandex. Now it has stopped accepting Yandex.dengs as payment for online games that bring it 30% of revenue^[5]

The refusal to accept Yandex.Money is stated on the websites of the games Mail.ru. From now on, the user can pay for games and game items either through the Деньги@Mail.ru payment system, or through the Qiwi wallet (Mail.ru Group owns 21.4% of Qiwi Ltd.), or through PayPal, or from a mobile account.

The representative of Mail.ru Group calls the refusal of Yandex.deneg a "strictly economic decision," and the deputy general director of Yandex.deneg Natalya Haytina a "competition technique": in her opinion, this is like banning, for example, receiving letters from Gmail. Yandex.dengs were not even notified of the termination of the contract, Haytina was outraged.

This is not the first time that the Mail.ru Group and its affiliated companies have terminated agreements with Yandex. At the end of 2009, Mail.ru replaced Yandex's search engine with its own. And since mid-March 2011, Qiwi payment terminals have become impossible to use to replenish accounts in Yandex.Money (and in 10 more payment systems).

Now Qiwi is one of the main, although not the only tool for replenishing services with Mail.ru and cash, and electronic money, says the president of the Qiwi Ltd group. Andrey Romanenko.

Yandex.dengs have previously occupied a not very significant share in payments for Mail.ru games, said Viktor Zakharchenko, executive director of online games manufacturer Drimmi. According to Igor Ivchenko, general director of the game payment aggregator Money Online, this share was 10-12%. For Yandex.deneg, gaming services are also not Mail.ru key partners, a source in one of the payment systems believes: Yandex.dengs cooperate, for example, with foreign gaming platforms.

For the Mail.ru Group itself, online gaming is an important source of revenue. Payments for games and game artifacts accounted for 30.7% of Mail.ru Group's 2010 revenue, or $99.8 million. Moreover, in absolute terms, this amount increased over the year by 62.5% - mainly due to an increase in the number of players.

According to Zakharchenko, Mail.ru has long decided to make Деньги@Mail.ru an entry point for payments for its services. Perhaps now she will want to expand the area of ​ ​ influence of this payment system, he suggests.

Having turned off Yandex.dengs, Mail.ru pursues several goals at once, Ivchenko is sure, and the transfer of transactions from Yandex.deneg to its own payment system is not the main one. Large Internet projects are beginning to think more often about the profitability of working with electronic payment systems, including the amount of commissions that systems charge them. And Yandex.deneg has a tightly regulated tariff policy that does not always suit large Internet projects, Ivchenko notes.

Usually, the payment system takes from the online service 2.5-5% of the amount that it transfers to its account from the user's electronic wallet, says Ivchenko. The average market commission is within this framework, confirms a source in one of the electronic payment systems. Yandex.deneg has a commission closer to the upper limit of this range and the rate depends little on the size of the turnover, says the manager of one of the partner companies Yandex.deneg.

So there is, confirms a source in the game developer company, explaining: this is Yandex's protective measure against gray schemes. The Commission is the subject of mutual agreement, says Haytina, but the Mail.ru Group did not even discuss the rate.

2013: What happens on the Mail.ru in 1 hour. Statistics

2016:25 million users' credentials and passwords stolen Mail.ru

According to the resource LeakedSource, which tracks password and personal data leaks, in August 2016, the logins and passwords of users of several game services were stolen mail.ru^[6].

According to LeakedSource, more than 12.8 million Crossfire accounts on the cfire.mail.ru domain were affected (6.2 million of them were decrypted), 5 million accounts of the game "Para Pa: City of Dances" on the parapa.mail.ru domain (3.3 million of them have already been opened), 3.99 million accounts to the fume of the same game (2.9 million decrypted) and 3.2 million passwords from "Tanks" (tanks.mail.ru). In total, more than 25 million accounts have been published.

LeakedSource says that the discovery of most of the passwords from stolen accounts was facilitated by the use of the MD5 algorithm for their encryption, which by now cannot be considered reliable protection.

Interestingly, more than a million passwords of Mail.ru users had the form "12345..." or "qwerty...," "1111..." etc., which greatly simplified their decryption.

In addition to passwords, users' email addresses and birthdays were stolen. For some records, attackers received IP addresses and phone numbers.

It is known that the forums worked on the vBulletin engine, and the SQL injection vulnerability (injection of SQL code into queries to the site) was used for the attack.

The Mail.ru press service said that the passwords published by LeakedSource belong to forums of game projects that the company has acquired in different years and are not related to the main mail service Mail.ru. Now the forums and games of Mail.Ru Group have been transferred to a single authorization system, company representatives say.

2018: Logo change

On October 10, 2018, Mail.Ru Group introduced an updated visual style of Mail and the Mail.Ru portal. Brighter and juicier colors were chosen for the design, and the logo received a laconic and adaptive design. The design of services has become more emotional and modern.

The "@" sign is the most famous design element of the Mail and the Mail.Ru portal. We used this strong side and made the sign simple, understandable and modern. We abandoned unnecessary elements, got rid of the ".ru" particle in the logo, which does not affect brand recognition. Without it, the main logo becomes easier and it is much easier to write the names of projects included in the portal: "Mail News" or "Mail Cloud." In addition, the logo has become adaptive: depending on the situation, you can use the abbreviated spelling of project names: "@ news," and the full "@ mail news," - commented on the rebranding Yuri Vetrov, design director of Mail.Ru.

Portal logo Mail.ru until October 10, 2018

The components of the updated design - form, composition, accents, fonts and other components - add up to a solid image and correspond to Mail.Ru's general strategy: to make smart, useful and secure services.

According to representatives of Mail.Ru Group, updating the visual style is just one of the stages of the planned changes, which supports the overall product development strategy.

2022

Update Master Page Design

The web version of the main Mail.ru in the updated design has become available to all users. The company announced this on September 5, 2022. The page received a different design and additional personalization - access to current services has become easier, and irrelevant blocks will be shown less often.

In the presented design, the most popular services have become more noticeable and more convenient for users. The interface has become more concise, styles and typography have changed. The Mail.ru logo was placed on a light background and placed above, next to productivity services: Cloud, Calendar, Tasks and Video Calls. "Picture of the Day," with news, a feed of recommended Pulse content, weather and currency rates, is now located on the right. On the left side of the screen is personal information, for example, notifications from social networks, games and other useful services.

Studies have shown that this is the interface structure that meets the needs of users. For example, they began to study news sections on the portal 12% more often and actively monitor weather forecasts. Important notifications and new messages are now more noticeable: checking Mail has become more convenient, and the number of registrations has increased by 10%.

We continue to develop personalization so that current services and the most interesting content are available to the user. The updated design will allow you to change the structure of the site according to individual needs and add useful services. More than half of the users of the Main Page have already noted the changes as useful, and we will continue to work to improve their experience, "said Alexander Lyskov, head of the product department.

Launch Yandex search

Pages go.mail.ru and mail.ru began to work search string with Yandex"," previously the holding VK used its own search engine technologies. This became known on December 13, 2022.

The update is related to the implementation of the company's overall strategy, the basis of which is the development of content services. We tried to maintain the interface familiar to users using Yandex search and hope that the experience of using the new solution will be effective and pleasant, the service said Mail.ru.

As the representative of Yandex specified, the Yandex search bar appeared on the Mail.ru portal "in accordance with the agreements with VK,"^[7].

Technologies of "Search for Mail.ru" will continue to work and develop within the company's products, such as the social network "VKontakte," "VK Music," "Mail Mail.ru" and others, and the search bar "Yandex" is available for users, explained in the holding^[8]

2023: Service Customer Data Breach Confirmation

Mail.ru confirmed reports of a leak of data from customers of the service. This became known on January 14, 2023.

The company explained the leakage of customer data with a "drain" from another service.

On the eve Telegram of the channel "Leaks" information reported a major leak of personal data the Russian users. A dump was discovered in the public domain by experts of the DLBI service, which contains a little more than 3.5 million records with contact data of users of mail services Mail.ru.

The published base contains the ID, addresses email on domains the mail.ru, bk.ru, inbox.ru and others, phones, names and surnames of users, as well as their logins.

In addition, hackers from the NLB group who posted the information claim to have a base with a much larger number of records on hand.

The press service of the Mail.ru confirmed reports of the publication on the Internet of part of the data of customers of the mail service, saying that the incident was related to the leakage of a third-party service in early 2022.

Mail users are not in danger, the service is reliably protected. The results of the audit showed that the published data was related to the leakage of a third-party service in early 2022. Specialists additionally conduct a thorough check, - TASS quotes the company's message.

Roskomnadzor The statement said that they intend to check such a data leak^[9]

Links

• Three lives Port.ru
• We did not take loans and now we do not take

Notes