February 1, 2010
Internet, February 1, 2010. Yandex announced preliminary unaudited results for 2009. Ruble revenue grew 14% compared to 2008 and reached 8.7 billion rubles ($278 million). As before, contextual ads accounted for 86% of the Company’s revenues. Display ads comprised 11%.
“Contextual advertising proved itself a stable business model,” says Alexey Tretyakov, Chief Sales and Business Development of Yandex. “During the crisis, many advertisers favored this business model over all other advertising opportunities. Contextual advertising on Yandex allows to closely manage advertiser’s budget and it is targeted at the most interested audience. That was why even those advertisers who had to cut their advertising budgets paid their attention to contextual ads. The crisis affected an average ad budget per client which decreased, but the total number of clients grew 55% in 2009. Over the twelve months, more than 120 thousand advertisers placed their ads on Yandex.”
Online advertising was the only segment of the Russian ad market that demonstrated positive dynamics, while all other segments were declining. According to AKAR, during the nine months of 2009, the overall Russian ad market fell 30% while display advertising grew 3%. The contextual ad market, in its turn, grew at least 10% according to experts’ estimates.”
TNS Russia reports that in 2009, Yandex’s audience grew 29% and in December 2009 reached 22.7 million users making Yandex the largest portal of the Runet for another time.
According to comScore, Yandex was the fastest growing search engine in the World in 2009 – the number of its search queries increased 91%.
In 2009, Yandex launched the new search platform which uses proprietary original machine-learning algorithm (MatrixNet). Particularly, it allowed showing local search results to users of over 1,250 Russian cities and towns. At the end of summer, users got an opportunity to listen to music in high quality, legally and for free. To learn about Yandex’s other important announcements in 2009 please go to our press-releases.
