Social Networking Watch: News on the Social Networking and Social Media Industry

Vkontakte IPO Likely To Be Delayed

BLOOMBERG – Jan 29 – The largest Russian social networking site has apparently put plans on hold for an initial public offering, according to two anonymous sources who have knowledge of the matter. Vkontakte began evaluating IPO plans in June 2011 but has not yet hired any banks to help sell its shares. The sources stated that the process may be restarted as soon as the market becomes favorable. Vkontakte is backed by Mail.ru Group and reportedly has 110M registered users, with approximately 70% of those residing in Russia. A Vkontakte spokesperson did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

See full article at The Moscow Times

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Mail.Ru's Social Network Mulls Selling 3% Stake Pre-IPO

TOTAL TELECOM - Jan 25 - Vkontakte.ru part-owned by Russian Internet company Mail.Ru Group confirmed reports that is looking for a minority investor prior to a possible IPO. Vkontakte.ru founder, Pavel Durov, considers an IPO a possible option in 2012 or 2013 and that the company isn't in talks with Mail.Ru and search engines Google or Yandex over the sale of any stake pre-IPO. "But we may sell a small share - about 3%- prior to the IPO to increase market capitalization before the IPO," he said.

See full article at Total Telecom

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VKontakte Donates $1 Million To Wikipedia

NEWS.AM - Jan 25 - Head of the Russia’s VKontakte social networking website Pavel Durov donated $1M to the Wikipedia. Wikipedia launched an annual campaign to collect donations for the maintenance of efficiency of the resource in November, 2011.

See full article at News.am

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Russian Social Network VKontakte Said to Consider IPO in U.S.

BLOOMBERG - June 23 - VKontakte, the largest Russian social network, is in early discussions with investment banks about a potential IPO. The company has discussed selling shares in New York as early as next year. VKontakte’s current shareholders include Russian Internet company Mail.ru Group, which also owns a stake in Facebook. VKontakte, based in Moscow, had ~28M users last year.

by Ambereen Choudhury, Zijing Wu and Matthew Campbell
See full article at Bloomberg

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Russian Internet Venture Builds Social Networking Empire

AFP - Jan 5 - The Russian investment company, DST Global, which has invested a further 50M dollars in Facebook, is headed by low-profile Internet tycoon Yury Milner. Milner is also the chairman of the rapidly expanding Mail.Ru Group, which has grown into the biggest Internet firm in the Russian-speaking world with stakes in e-mail and social networks. Mail.Ru owns 100 % of Russian networking site Odnoklassniki, and also has a significant stake in the country's other major networking site, Vkontakte. The group owns 2.38% of Facebook, while DST Global, the investment vehicle, also has an undisclosed stake of its own in Facebook which unconfirmed reports last year put at a total holding of 10%. FULL ARTICLE @ AFP

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Russian Yandex Partners With VKontakte

TECH CRUNCH - Dec 2 - Russian search giant Yandex, that is thought to be considering an IPO for up to $1.5 billion, partners with local Facebook-clone VKontakte, which is the largest social network in Russia. Under the arrangement, the public-facing elements of VKontakte user profiles will show up in Yandex searches in realtime. So far Yandex indexing ~25m user profiles. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Vkontakte.ru Plans To Go Global

TECH CRUNCH -- Sep 7 -- Russian social network Vkontakte.ru is plotting an international roll-out. The company has recently acquired the domain name vk.com for an undisclosed amount and plans to use it to brand and market Vkontakte.ru in 12 unnamed languages, starting October this year. Vkontakte.ru is backed by Digital Sky Technologies (DST), the same investor who recently took a 1.96% stake in Facebook for $200M. kontakte.ru claims to have attracted over 42M registered users and comScore pegs the number of unique visitors to exceed 14M per month. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH

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Facebook Tries To Blaze A Path In Russia

NY TIMES -- June 20 -- Google has floundered. So has MySpace. Now Facebook is trying to gain a toehold in Russia. The Russian-language version of Facebook was launched this week, taking on a host of home-grown and successful social networking sites, including VKontakte, a Facebook-like site on the Russian Internet. MySpace, which entered Russia in January, has attained only small percent of the market. MySpace and Google have had similar fates in China, where the two companies, in addition to the online auction site eBay, have been trampled by local look-alikes. FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES

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Facebook's Foreign Clones

FORBES -- June 12 -- If users aren't satisfied to merely create a Facebook profile, Agriya Infospace, based in Chennai, India, offers another option: Create your own Facebook. Agriya sells what it calls "Kootali," a $400 software package that lets developers replicate Facebook's design and features, complete with friend networks, photos and "mini-feeds"--even Facebook's font. Their customers, mostly unknown sites like Faceclub.com and Umicity.com, don't pose much of a competitive threat to Facebook. But, according to Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang, Agriya's cloning software represents a more general problem for Facebook: that any skilled developer can recreate the site's basic social networking functions.

Facebook Copycats Abroad
StudiVerzeichnis, German for "Student Index", have gathered around 6m registered users.
VKontakte, is with 4.5m unique visitors a day and 13.3m registered users, the most popular site in Russia
Chinnese Xiaonei claims to have received around 15m unique visitors in April

The copycats' explosive growth comes at a time when Facebook seems to be exploring its own international offshoots but the clones may have already saturated some international markets. In China, Xiaonei has already registered more than 90% of college students. Wang Xing, who created Xiaonei in 2005, admits that the site's design was originally "borrowed" from Facebook. Asked if he feels any compunction about taking features wholesale from Facebook, Wang points to Mark Zuckerberg's own copycat problems. Since 2004, the owners of rival site ConnectU have claimed that Zuckerberg stole intellectual property from their social network while working as a software developer for the site.
FULL ARTICLE @ FORBES

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