Yandex and Google want to oblige social advertising

The State Duma Committee on Information Policy has prepared amendments for the law "On Advertising", which oblige Internet sites, whose attendance per day exceeding 100 thousand users ("Yandex", Google, Mail.ru Group and others), give up to 5% of advertising time or areas for social advertising.

According to the document, which is planned to be introduced to the State Duma in the spring, the Ministry of Cyphra will choose a social advertising operator on the Internet, which will become a single window for organizations who want to publish it. The selection of specific advertising messages will be organized through the competition. The operator will also receive from advertising distributors the forecast of the volume of advertising. In case of failure to fulfill the requirements, the owners of advertising networks and advertising distributors may “be limited to activities,” Kommersant writes.

According to the source of the publication, the Institute for the Development of the Internet (IRI), the co -founder of which is the Government of the Russian Federation, may become a single operator of social advertising. In the past, Iri signed a memorandum of social advertising with Mail.ru Group, Rambler Group and Yandex. IRI CEO Anton Klyuchkin said that the sites, allegedly, will provide the operator with a “certain tools”, for example, access to advertising rooms.

“Thus, he will be able to participate in auctions on the purchase of advertising along with other players,” Klyuchkin said, clarifying that the account in his personal account will be virtual funds that advertisers will pay for sites based on quotal agreements.

Klyuchkin added that at the first stage the amendments will only be affected by large sites, including Yandex, Mail.ru Group, Rambler Group and Google. In turn, the head of the Duma Committee on Inform Policy, Alexander Khinshtein, noted that it is not planned to distribute the requirements of the bill on the electronic media, the bills of the bill are not planned to be distributed.

According to Andrei Tsyper, the executive director of the Media Rambler Group, the introduction of quotas for social advertising is associated among other things that during the pandemic the number of socially significant projects on the Internet has increased. In Yandex, Mail.ru Group and Google did not respond to the requests of the publication.

“The idea sounds as correct, but in fact you get another direction of spending money on taxpayers,” commented the initiative, chief analyst of the Russian Association of Electronic Communications (RAEK) Karen Ghazaryan, noting that the Internet platforms themselves may lose part of the income from commercial advertising.

According to the participants in the advertising market, the new requirements are unlikely to significantly affect the volume of the market, but it is possible that with the introduction of strict requirements to transfer the premium space for commercial advertising on the Internet, they can grow under social advertising.