1 Yandex

Revenue: $1220 million

Year founded: 2000

Site: Yandex.ru

Number of employees: 4500

Figure: 250 million requests per day are processed by Yandex search

Owners: Yandex was created in the late 1990s by IT entrepreneur Arkady Volozh (No. 94 in the Russian Forbes ranking, net worth $1.15 billion) and programmer Ilya Segalovich. As of the summer of 2013, Volozh owned 10.6% of the company, the Baring Vostok fund - 7%. In July 2013, Ilya Segalovich died, and members of his family became the heirs of 2.5% of the shares.

Business: Yandex is the largest search engine on the Runet, which, according to LiveInternet estimates, accounts for 62% of search queries, while global Google has 26.5%. The overwhelming majority of Yandex’s revenue comes from contextual advertising, which allowed it to overtake Channel One in 2013, whose revenue is estimated by experts at 32 billion rubles.

Over the year: In July, Yandex launched a beta version of the new “Islands” platform, which will replace the usual search results with links to thematic blocks in which services will be immediately offered. The company also launched a single shopping cart in Yandex.Market, which allows you to place orders without going to store websites, and began selling advertising in Mail.ru search.

Transactions: In October, Yandex bought for $80 million the resource Kinopoisk.ru, where users can get information about films and TV series.

Fact: A detailed map of the world has appeared on Yandex.Maps.

2 Mail.ru Group

Revenue: $796 million

Year founded: 1998

Sites: Mail.ru, Odnoklassniki.ru, Hh.ru

Number of employees: 3100

Figure: more than 100 million active mail accounts

Owners: The group grew out of an email service created by St. Petersburg programmers. Among the main co-owners of the holding are the NMT group of billionaire Alisher Usmanov (No. 1 on the Forbes 2013 list) (45%) and the South African media group Naspers (29%). The general director of the holding, Dmitry Grishin, has a minority stake. Capitalization of Mail.ru as of February 5, 2014: $8.8 billion.

Business: Mail.ru Group's main income comes from advertising and applications. The group owns the mail service of the same name, 100% of the social networks Odnoklassniki (43 million users per month) and My World, the largest job search portal in Russia Headhunter.ru, the network messenger ICQ and Mail.ru Agent, as well as 39 .9% of the VKontakte network, 10.4% of QIWI and other projects.

During the year: Entered the American market under the new My.com brand.

3 VKontakte

Revenue: $215 million

Year founded: 2006

Site: Vk.com

Employees: n. d.

Figure: 60 million users - daily audience of VKontakte

Owners: In April 2013, Ilya Shcherbovich’s UCP fund bought 48% of the network from the founders of the social network, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev. At the beginning of 2014, it became known that the general director of VKontakte Pavel Durov sold his share (12.5%) to Alisher Usmanov’s junior partner Ivan Tavrin. 39.99% of VKontakte belongs to Mail.ru Group, the main shareholder of which is Usmanov.

Business: The largest social network in Runet for communication among young people, similar in functionality to Facebook. It makes money from online advertising and fees from developers of various applications hosted on the network. The new shareholder of UCP intends to bring the social network to an IPO and raised the issue of insufficient monetization of the resource.

Over the year: A number of key business positions in VKontakte were occupied by people who previously worked in the structures of billionaire Alisher Usmanov (No. 1 in the Russian Forbes ranking, net worth $17.6 billion), who controls Megafon and Mail.ru Group.

4 RBC

Revenue: $156 million

Year founded: 1993

Website: Rbc.ru, Qip.ru

Number of employees: 1500

Figure: more than 72 million people - monthly audience of all media products of the holding

Owners: In 1992, economics student German Kaplun, together with his friend, programmer Alexander Morgulchik, began publishing the daily Rosbusinessconsulting newsletter with business news, analytics and exchange rates. In 2010, control over the RBC holding was received by the Onexim group of Mikhail Prokhorov (No. 10 in the Russian Forbes ranking, fortune $13 billion), it owns 56.36% of the shares.

Business: The structure of the holding includes the information portal Rbc.ru, the RBC TV channel, the magazine of the same name, the RBC Daily newspaper and another three dozen different information resources. Revenue from online activities in 2013 - online advertising and services - amounted to $118 million.

Over the year: At the end of the year, Nikolai Molibog became the CEO of RBC, and Derk Sauer, who held this post, headed the board of directors of the holding. Former editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine Elizaveta Osetinskaya became chief editor of the holding’s media projects.

Transaction: Burda bought from RBC the publishing house Salon-Press, which publishes the magazines SALON-interior, DOMUS, Ideas for Your Home, applications and catalogs dedicated to architecture, design and construction. The transaction amount is estimated to be $15–20 million.

5 Afisha-Rambler-SUP

Revenue: $133 million

Year founded: 2013

Site: LiveJournal.com, Rambler.ru, Afisha.ru

Number of employees: 1500

Figure: 37.2 million people - the total audience of the holding’s media platforms

Owners: Alexander Mamut (No. 45 in the ranking of the 200 richest businessmen in Russia according to Forbes, net worth: $2.3 billion), Vladimir Potanin (No. 7 in the ranking of the 200 richest businessmen in Russia according to Forbes, net worth: $14.3 billion).

Business: The company owns the portal Rambler.ru, a resource about city life and entertainment Afisha.ru, online newspapers Lenta.ru, Gazeta.ru, Championat.com, LiveJournal.com, the gaming portal Kanobu.ru, the contextual advertising service Begun.ru and etc.

Over the year: In May, Mamut’s A&NN group and Potanin’s Interros holding merged SUP Media and Afisha-Rambler into a single holding. Mamut took over operational management.

6 Free

Revenue: $130 million

Year founded: 2001

Site: I-Free.com

Employees: 650

Figure: iFree products and services are available in 100 countries

Owners: After attending a conference on the Internet, two friends Kirill Gorynya and Sergey Shulga became interested in innovation in the mobile industry and decided to organize a startup. A year later, Kirill Petrov, who had previously worked at MTS, joined them.

Business: The company creates mobile applications and other projects in the field of mobile and NFC technologies (near field communication). More than half of the revenue comes from the b2c segment, iFree claims. Headquarters - in St. Petersburg.

Over the year: An agreement was signed with China Telecom on a partnership in the field of mobile games, and an NFC wallet was launched in Russia, allowing payment, transport and other cards to be downloaded to a smartphone in the same way as games and applications.

7 Game Insight

Revenue: $110 million

Year founded: 2010

Site: Game-insight.com

Employees: 900

Figure: 250 million people – the company’s gaming audience

Owners: The founders of the company are Alisa Chumachenko and several of her partners. Until the end of 2009, she worked at Astrum, but after its merger with Mail.ru Group she founded her own game developer, Game Insight, where the IMI.VC fund of Igor Matsanyuk, the former president of Astrum, later invested.

Business: Game Insight develops and publishes computer games. All of the company's games work according to the free-to-play scheme: we play for free, bonuses for money. The company has 35 games, of which 25 are mobile games, 10 are on social networks, and 8 are cross-platform.

For the year: Localization of games for the countries of South Korea, UAE, Turkey and Brazil.

8 2GIS

Revenue: $97 million

Year founded: 1999

Site: 2gis.ru

Number of employees: 3000

Figure: 20 million people use electronic directories and 2GIS maps

Owners: 2GIS is a family business of Novosibirsk entrepreneur Alexander Sysoev and his wife Marina. Sysoev came up with “DublGIS” (today – “2GIS”) after creating an electronic city plan for telephone operators.

Business: The first 2GIS program, combining a map and a directory, was released on a floppy disk. The project makes money through advertising sales and is free for users. Maps allow you to navigate in 250 cities of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Italy and other countries.

During the year: The service was launched in Prague (Czech Republic) and Limassol (Cyprus). Using 2GIS, you can book a table in a restaurant, order movie tickets or sign up for a beauty salon.

9 Super job

Revenue: $65 million

Year founded: 2000

Site: Superjob.ru

Number of employees: 192

Figure: 920,000 employers used Superjob services

Owners: Alexey Zakharov and Sergey Gabestro (former founders of Triumvirat Development, which created and supported corporate websites). They also created Fabrikant.ru (a platform for competitive procurement) and Obed.ru (ordering lunches with delivery to offices), but both projects are inferior to Superjob.ru in terms of total revenue.

Business: Superjob is the second most popular recruitment portal on the Runet after Hh.ru, with an average of 6 million visitors per month, according to TNS. The company's headquarters is located in Moscow, but you can find work with its help throughout Russia.

For the year: Launch of a mobile application for devices based on iOS and Android.

10 Grandfather

Revenue: $60 million

Year founded: 2007

Site: Avito.ru

Number of employees: 176

Figure: 17,466,208 advertisements for the sale or purchase of cars, apartments, houses, laptops or job searches were posted on the site by February 2014

Owners: The idea to open a free classifieds site in Russia came to Swede Jonas Nordlander. He was supported by investor Philip Engelbert, and in 2007, together they launched Avito.ru. Portfolio investors include Kinnevik, Vostok Nafta, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Naspers.

Business: Avito.ru is the largest trading platform on the RuNet; 400,000 new advertisements appear on the site every day. According to the company, more than €20 billion worth of goods were sold on the site in 2012. The main sources of income are the sale of advertising and fees for services.

Over the year: In May, the owners agreed with the South African Naspers to absorb two of its resources: Slando.ru and OLX.ru. Naspers invested another $50 million in Avito, receiving 18.6% of the company.

10 largest internet companies