Yandex parted ways with ICQ

The most popular instant messaging service has changed its owner and distribution platform. What is the reason?

Russia's largest Internet company, Yandex, and the country's most popular instant messaging service, ICQ (known to us by the surprisingly appropriate name "ICQ"), have announced the end of their cooperation. Analysts...

Russia's largest Internet company, Yandex, and the country's most popular instant messaging service, ICQ (known to us by the surprisingly appropriate name "ICQ"), have announced the end of their cooperation.

Analysts comment on this in light of the acquisition of ICQ by the Russian fund Digital Sky Technologies of Alisher Usmanov, Yuri Milner and Grigory Finger for $187.5 million from AOL (America Online), the largest Internet provider in the US. The Usmanov Foundation owns Yandex's largest competitor, Mail.ru.

Interestingly, the creator of ICQ, Israeli Mirabilis, sold it to AOL in 1998 for twice the amount. This fact should not be considered as a sign of ICQ stagnation - in 1998 there was a peak of excitement for investing money online, which later became known as the “dot-com bubble” (from the English pronunciation “.com”), then not that much money was thrown away simply on wind. And ICQ has gained 32 million monthly users over the years, and it is especially popular in Russia - in the West, besides Germany, other Internet pagers are more common.

According to the Vedomosti expert, ICQ, the client program of which Yandex distributed in a bundle with its services, could bring him an income of $ 100-200 thousand per year, which, of course, is not much on the scale of Yandex, and the loss is small. It is quite possible that the right to distribute ICQ will soon be lost by another competitor of Yandex and Mail.Ru - Rambler, which has been actively offering it in conjunction with its free mail since 2005. Any mail user on Rambler automatically turns out to be an ICQ user, even if he is not going to deal with him at all. Apparently, therefore, according to the same Vedomosti, the revenue from cooperation with ICQ in Rambler is much higher - $ 6-8 million per year, and for him the loss will be sensitive.

Of course, users of Yandex services will not be excommunicated from ICQ - all of them will automatically update the program to a "clean" version that is not associated with Yandex. The intrigue here lies elsewhere: according to ICQ itself, 40% of Russian ICQ users use other pagers compatible with it rather than their "native" program. By the way, compatible is not quite legal: officially ICQ technology is closed, and AOL has never sold licenses for it (although it did not prosecute for using it, apparently considering it as a way of promotion). Among these "compatible" and "Mail.Ru Agent", which has an audience of half "ICK" - 16 million, and almost all of these users are in Russia.

Therefore, it is simply unprofitable for Mail.Ru to compete with itself by distributing an alternative. But there is no need to worry that "ICQ" in the hands of the new owners will die either - most likely, they will try to convert its audience into their own. Well, the official ownership of both the technology itself and the group of its developers is also not the last thing.