Fifteen percent ownership of Russian email, news and blog portal Mail.ru was purchased this summer for $300 million, according to new reports today from Russian journalists citing sources close to the deal. That puts the full value of the company at a whopping $2 billion, 30% more than Google paid for YouTube.
The shares were bought by internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, which now controls 50.6% of Mail.ru. You can see a clumsily Google-translated version of the site's "blogs" section here.
According to the Quintura blog, the site is the most popular web property in Russia with 14.7 million monthly visitors. Search engine Quintura provides the most exhaustive English language coverage of the internet industry in Russia on its blog. [disclosure: Quintura is a RWW sponsor]
Traffic analysts Quantcast estimate the site sees almost one million visitors each month from the US. For context, Facebook says it sees 100 million unique visitors per month from around the world.
Another 32% of Mail.ru is owned by South African conglomerate Naspers, the same company that we reported acquired African social media aggregator Afrigator earlier this month. Naspers says that Mail.ru generated $56 million in revenue last year, meaning presumably that it's either growing revenues quickly and/or is now drastically over-valued. 40X annual revenue is the kind of valuation that people make fun of Silicon Valley for.
The moral of the story here is that there is huge internet activity all around the world and not just in Silicon Valley. Many of our international readers are fully aware of that but even we need occasional comments or multi-billion dollar valuations in order to remember.
Comments
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Marshall,
It would be nice to have some Rosling style visualizations on user age / traffic / vertical / time online / online spending / country / etc to see internet trends around the world.
Lots of combinations to play with. Perhaps someone could publish the datasets and create a website so people could remix this.
We see events like these happen in isolation but they must conform to some ( set of ) evolutionary force.
I know I am saying obvious stuff and this is a more generic problem. But it would be nice to see it for internet data as it is still so misunderstood and keeps surprising us.
( Not like stock markets, where we have everything figured out. Specially the guys at wall street ;)
http://blog.aldobucchi.com/2008/06/hans-rosling-and-his-dancing-bubbles.html
Posted by: Aldo Bucchi
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September 23, 2008 10:05 PM
RuNet (Russian Internet) is undergoing a rapid transition from what the internet looked like here in 1999 (portals, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail) to what it is now (Google, web 2.0, facebook, wikipedia).
Given that they are following a known path they will close the gap much faster and you will see the crash of the incumbents (just like Yahoo and AOL did) very quickly. Here goes your $2bln valuation.
Of cause, this is based on the assumption that the current monsters of RuNet (Rambler, Mail.ru, Yandex) do not adapt. I doubt they will.
By the way, I don't know what's the best English language blog about RuNet, but the Quintura one is full of bullshit. I wouldn't count on it. And the guys from Quintura were caught out lying about their search technology while trolling TC comments.
Posted by: mukzz | September 24, 2008 12:10 AM
Become the owner of the internet.
The internet belongs to everyone. That includes you. Go to www.internetismine.be and claim the internet as yours.
Posted by: Grapplica | September 24, 2008 2:26 AM
Naspers is a nationalised org, from the bad old days in SA, with a very big "good ol' boys" board.
Effectively they've done everything that's bad in media, censorship, pandering to gov, suppression of free speech, unfair compition to suppress free publication, spreading of FUD to discourage dissedents.
Wouldn't trust them in the slightest.
Posted by: Ronald Hobbs | September 24, 2008 2:43 AM
Mail - it's very big spam mail)
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Posted by: bulseye | October 2, 2008 1:29 AM