Yandex 2006

In 2006 the Internet in Russia finally became massively popular. According to FOM, every fifth Russian has used the Internet by the end of the year. The daily Yandex audience came to 5 million users by the beginning of 2007 — that was the number of users in the whole Russian Internet five years ago.

A whole range of Internet services was launched by Yandex within the year. Car owners were introduced to the traffic monitoring in Moscow, and later, to the “Yandex traffic lights” on the portal's main page. Yandex.News learned how to make press-portraits and how to locate the events from the news on the maps. We took blogs.yandex.ru, the search service over public opinion in the Internet, out of beta.

Yandex Personal Search learned to search the archives of Mozilla Thunderbird email client, and, then, also the archives of a very popular in Russia The Bat!. Yandex.Bar, the toolbar for handy Internet navigation, became accessible for the users of Mozilla Firefox browser.

In September 2006 Yandex opened the first remote development office in Saint Petersburg, and the Ukrainian sales office had its first anniversary.

Advertisers running targeted ads at Yandex were offered an opportunity to place their telephone numbers and addresses right on Yandex, as well as a range of new instruments to manage the advertising campaign, in particular, autofocus and autobudget. The admittance threshold for placing advertisements on Yandex.Direct became lower — the minimal price of one click-through is 30 kopecks. Yandex Advertising Network expanded considerably — hundreds of well-known websites became a part of it, with Mail.ru being the largest.

The first “Internet and business” conference was held in April 2006 with support from Yandex; one of the results of this conference was an agreement to create a branch association of the Russian Internet. In July Yandex hosted the first Internet-conference of the Russia's president.