Translated material
The VKontakte network acquired VK.com domain to work abroad
The social network "VKontakte" acquired the domain name vk.com, writes the newspaper "Vedomosti" .
The largest company of this kind in Russia, according to the executive director of VKontakte, Leva Levieva, is going to develop abroad and by October will launch versions of the VK.com website in 12 languages. The combination of VK will become an international brand of the social network, he explains. Leviev does not call the amount of the transaction.
The ex -leader of the Russian Myspace office, Alexander Turkot, appreciated the costs of “in contact” for the purchase of a domain of several tens of thousands of dollars, and the director of the Coordinating Center of the Domain. Andrei Kolesnikov - a maximum of 100 thousand dollars.
In the first half of 2009, “in contact” earned $ 4.5 million, Leonid Delitsyn from Finam calculated (the company itself does not disclose financial indicators).
According to TNS, the monthly audience "Contact" in June is 13.9 million unique users. Its closest competitor - "Odnoklassniki" (12.4 million) has only two language versions (second - Ukrainian), and "My Mir@mail.ru" (10.1 million) is limited by the Russian language.
The largest foreign social network has 225 million users, have versions in 63 languages, and Myspace (130 million) has 33 local sites. True, in August, Myspace closed representative offices in 10 countries, including Russia.
The launch of VKontakte in other languages is an image move, says Denis Terekhov, managing partner of the social networks of the social networks. He does not exclude that buying a domain in the .com zone is part of the preparation for the sale of a social network. At the same time, the source close to the “Contact” shareholders in contact, the source assured the newspaper that it was definitely not about selling.