Mail.ru, Yandex agree to place ads from Yandex.Direct on search engine
MOSCOW. July 25 (Interfax) - The board of directors at the Internet companies Mail.ru Group and Yandex have confirmed an agreement by which the Mail.ru search results page will display a contextual advertisement for the Yandex.Direct system, a Mail.ru statement says.
Mail.ru Group previously had a similar arrangement with Google, but that has come to an end. Mail.ru has not commented on the terms of its deal with Yandex, saying only that they are "mutually beneficial."
Testing with Yandex.Direct began on the first of this month.
Mail.ru Group has said that it has completed a transition to the use of its own search driver in the service Poisk@Mail.ru.
According to Mail.ru, at the start of the month the company's search engine indexed ten billion documents, where at the start of the year that figure was five billion. The company said that this past May Poisk@Mail.ru processed 39.5 million user inquiries worldwide (data from comScore).
Mail.ru has in the past used two search drivers, Google's and its own. Google was used mainly for inquiries outside the Russian segment of the Internet.
This past April, Mail.ru management announced plans to double the number of Internet documents indexed by its search engine this year.
According to LiveInternet, Poisk@Mail.ru accounted for 8.6% of all search inquiries in Russia last month (8.7% in each of the two preceding months). Yandex and Google accounted for a respective 61.6% and 26.3%.
Mail.ru Group includes the Mail.ru internet portal, 100% of the ICQ instant messaging service, and 21.5% of the Qiwi payment service. It also owns 100% of HeadHunter.ru and the Odnoklassniki social networking site, and 39.99% of the VKontakte social networking site.
Alisher Usmanov's organizations own 58.1% of votes and 17.9% of charter capital (37.408 million "A" shares). South African Naspers has 35% of votes and 29% of capital (43.122 million "A" shares and 17.514 million ordinary shares) via MIH Mail Investment Company BV. Although its shares total is greater, as a foreign company, MIH's voting share is limited to 35% under the company charter. Chinese Tencent controls 1% of votes and 7.8% of charter capital via TCH Amur Ltd (16.228 million ordinary shares). CEO and board chairman Dmitry Grishin has 1.85% of capital (3,859,590 shares).
