VK seriously believes that it can become a "killer YouTube"

Stepan Kovalchuk was appointed head of the social network (you know this surname). The Bell tells who it is

In September 2023, VK announced the creation of two business groups in the structure of the company: one included Mail.ru postal service, Rustore, VK ID and VK Pay, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, as well as Zen, VK VK Music, VK Clips and VK Messenger. The group, which was left for all the content projects, was headed by 29-year-old Stepan Kovalchuk, the grandson of the President of the Kurchatov Institute Mikhail Kovalchuk and the grandson of the co-owner of the Bank of Russia Yuri Kovalchuk.

According to The Bell in his investigation, Kovalchuk’s career in social networks began with the “Live” project, launched in 2016 with the money of the National Media Group (NMG). The idea of ​​the project was to launch a flash mob on VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, in the framework of which users had to share “positive content” about overcoming difficulties.

The first channel was the information partner of the project, according to which the composer and producer Igor Matvienko came up and launched “live” and launched. However, in 2020, the son of the political strategist Efim Ostrovsky Efim Ostrovsky Jr. said that his father’s wife came up with the “live” project at the request of a very influential Kovalchuk family-to pull out Stepa Kovalchuk, so that he would not finally become a football player. ” However, Stepan Kovalchuk, as Ostrovsky claimed, did not devote much time to work: "I bought a red Porsche and drove for girls."

One of The Bell's interlocutors says that 22-year-old Stepan Kovalchuk was attracted to this project at the request of his father, the head of the NMG, Kirill Kovalchuk, so that he gained experience in working with social networks. The sponsors of the “Live” project, except for Channel One, were other structures of the media holding Yuri Kovalchuk, including Life, Izvestia, the newspaper Metro and Komsomolskaya Pravda.

In VK, Stepan Kovalchuk began working in 2017, but what exactly he did, the company did not specify. One of the interlocutors The Bell, who worked in the VK manager, says that Stepan Kovalchuk to work “at the insistence of close relatives” was asked personally by the head of the company Boris Dobroduev, the son of the head of the VGTRK Oleg Dobrodeev.

In December 2018, Stepan Kovalchuk was appointed vice president of the company. According to several interlocutors of The Bell, in this post Kovalchuk made his own projects for the social networks of the holding - for example, the Night Contact show, which was supposed to compete with the "evening Urgant" - and also was responsible for the promotion of information reasons important for the Kremlin. However, the real authorities and its own large budgets in VK, according to The Bell, did not have Stepan Kovalchuk before the change of shareholders.

In December 2021, billionaire Alisher Usmanov, who owned VK, sold his share of the structures of Yuri and Mikhail Kovalchukov. The new general director of the company was Vladimir Kiriyenko, whose father, the first deputy head of the presidential administration Sergey Kiriyenko, has long been familiar with Kovalchuki well. In February 2022, Kiriyenko appointed Stepan Kovalchuk as a senior vice president of the Media Strategy and Service Development Group.

In early September 2023, VK announced the division of business into two groups, and Stepan Kovalchuk began to lead social networks. According to the two interlocutors of The Bell in the company, in its content strategy under Kovalchuk, VKontakte relied on bloggers, stars and exclusive content. As part of this strategy, she lures on her platforms of famous bloggers from YouTube and Tiktok, and at the end of December 2022 she bought the Medium Quality studio, which issued the popular show “What happened”, which collects tens of millions of views. After this purchase, all the issues of “what happened next” were deleted with YouTube.

“Hundreds of millions of rubles are ready to pay for some VK content. For the fees of some bloggers, it was possible to license half the Universal library, ”says one of The Bell's interlocutors in the video services market. However, according to him, "none of the VK purchases brought her some sequel that would tear the market."

The Bell notes that VK can play a role in the likely blocking of YouTube, from which the Russian authorities still held mainly the lack of a good domestic analogue.

In the VK itself, as Bell writes, “more than seriously” to the role of the “YouTube killer”, as the Bell writes. Over the past two years, the company got rid of all non -core assets, began to actively develop the short video service “Clips” and highlighted in a separate “VK Vide” platform. For competition, as the federal official told The Bell, both in the Kremlin and the bet are made on VK.

According to the Bell source, to wait for YouTube blocking before the presidential election in March 2024 is not worth it - and this gives VK time to “thoroughly prepare”.