Mail.ru and Yandex Announce Strategic Agreement

Internet, January 16, 2006. Two largest Russian Internet portals Mail.Ru and Yandex agreed to form a strategic partnership in search technologies and context advertising.

According to the agreement, at the beginning of 2006 a search engine developed by Yandex was added to the portal Mail.Ru, and all content ads on search result pages will be placed by Yandex.Direct system.

At the end of 2005, the contract between Mail.Ru and Google, the previous supplier of the search solution, expired. The management of Mail.Ru made a decision to consider all the existing competitive offers in this segment. A number of large Russian and foreign search systems, including the former supplier, were analyzed as potential partners.

“The decision to choose Yandex as the partner to provide a sale system for content advertising and a search solution was based on a number of factors,” explains Dmitriy Grishin, CEO of Mail.Ru. “First, it is a possibility to provide the users of our portal with a quality search engine, customized for Russian-speaking people. Second, we believe that this partnership will enable us to substantially increase our income from selling keyword advertisement.”

“We are happy to offer our customers a new attractive and efficient facility for keyword advertising,” says Alexey Tretyakov, Yandex Chief Commercial Officer. “With Poisk@Mail.Ru now available, the advertisers of Yandex.Direct get both a tangible increase in the number of views and a larger target audience.”

Mail.Ru is one of the leaders on the Russian Internet market. The monthly audience of the holding’s projects is more than 15 million users, or 80% of the total Russian-language Internet audience. Some of the projects of Mail.Ru are: the largest webmail service in Russia Mail.Ru, the search system Poisk@Mail.Ru, the oldest catalog of the Russian Internet Catalog@Mail.Ru (formerly List.ru), the most popular online auction Molotok.ru, the trading portal Torg.ru, the largest е-mail distribution service Content@Mail.Ru, online dating and socializing services Znakomstva@Mail.Ru and Chaty@Mail.Ru, information projects Novosti@Mail.Ru and Afisha@Mail.Ru, and many others.

Contact Information:

Anna Artamonova

Marketing and PR Director

Mail.Ru

artamonova@corp.Mail.Ru

Tel. 725-63-57

Yandex is the largest Russian portal providing its users with key web services. The daily audience of Yandex exceeds three million people, and its monthly audience is more than 20 million.

Yandex.Direct is a service for placing keyword advertisement.

Tens of thousands of customers use this ad placement service: today, Yandex.Direct simultaneously holds 15,000 advertising campaigns by more than 230,000 keywords. Yandex Advertising Network, launched in late 2005, invites search systems and theme sites to participate.

Contact:
Media Relations
Vladimir Isaev, Ochir Mandzhikov
Phone: +7 495 739-7000
E-mail: pr@yandex-team.com