Google Ready to Reshape Russia’s Market
World popular search engine, Google, announced yesterday the launch of context advertising service in Russia. The plans of the Internet giant are to change the force distribution on local market. Russia’s analysts are not very enthusiastic, predicting that the local blockbusters won’t yield immediately and the company will need at least two years to attain its purpose.
Google has officially launched the Google.AdWords in Russia. “Russia’s potential is enormous with context ad sales doubling annually. This trend is likely to survive for a few years, as no more than about 20 million residents of the country have the net access today,” said Vladimir Dolgov, chief of Google’s office in Russia. “That’s why Google has arrived in Russia with serious intentions; we bring our technology and are certain that the market’s redistribution will occur in the near term.”
Google isn’t very popular in Russia yet. The American search engine doesn’t have many visitors here, so its attractiveness to advertisers is ten fold below Yandex, said Igor Ashmanov, chief of Ashmanov & Partners. “Google’s sales won’t grow significantly for Russia’s account at first. To change the status quo, the company will have to really invest in marketing,” Ashmanov said.
According to Aton, the context advertising in Runet amounts to $80 million today, but the size doubles each year, making it rather lucrative for foreigners in a couple of years. “The Americans have good chances to crush strong locals, as the company may allow the marketing budget bigger than the whole size of the market,” said Aton analyst Tatiana Kapustina.
But in Moscow office of Google, they overruled the mere possibility of big promotion, pointing out it isn’t the company’s policy.
Today’s biggest players of Russia’s context advertising are Yandex (over 50 percent), Begun (around 25 percent) and Rambler (around 12 percent).
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 08, 2006
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