Yandex 2004

In 2004, advertising gross revenue of Yandex tripled. Yandex sales increased to $18 mln that was the ten times increase compared to 2002 . Net income came to $7 mln. Search engine advertising became the main business driver, responsible for 75% of gross revenues.

This year considerable attention was devoted to regions. The Yandex.Goroda (Yandex.Cities) service attracted a lot of new partners. Yandex News and Market were regionalized. Ten Yandex seminars were held in 9 cities, and were attended by over 1000 participants. One hundred people became Yandex certified internet professionals.

Yandex participated in the creation of the national Russian language corpus project (collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of modern Russian, both spoken and written) and established scientific scholarships in the area of web-data processing.

Yandex Search started to read new file formats, such as PDF, DOC, RTF, Flash, XLS and PPT. Some of the newly added services that are worth pointing out are the Maps search and the Blogs/Forums search.

Yandex free mail service was also improved with features like unlimited mailbox size and spam protection.

The new project, Yandex.WiFi stimulated the development of free wireless internet access. It became the largest hot spot network with over 50 participants signing up in the first 6 months.