Russian Email Provider Worth One Third of YouTube?
by
on January 25, 2007,
Multinational media holding Naspers Limited has acquired 30% stake in Port.ru for $ 165 million. Port.ru owns one of the largest Internet portals - Mail.ru. Mail.ru is definitely the best-known and one of the most visited Russian portals: it receives 3 million unique visitors daily and about two billion monthly page views. Mail.ru is also ranked as the number one e-mail provider for Russian-speaking community.
You could definitely tell that email has almost nothing to do with Web 2.0. Sure, I can agree with you on that. But the thing is that Mail.ru is the first destination for any Russian person who starts his or her virtual life at all: the person usually goes to Mail.ru, registers an email account here and starts using it. That was what I did some 7 years ago. And something that today's 14-year-olds do now.
As for the email service offered by Mail.ru, it is definitely not the worst one I have seen. Moreover, I still use that 7-year-old account for some private messages and subscriptions to various spam-generating websites. Features are impressive for a local and absolutely free email service:
- unlimited storage capacity
- online interface
- pop3, smtp and imap support
- spam filter
When you register an email account with Mail.ru (three domain names available - mail.ru, list.ru, inbox.ru, bk.ru), you get access to quite an impressive number of services - some of them really Web 2.0 ones:
- Calendar
- Photo hosting
- Blogging
Blogs support groups, friends' networks, multimedia content. Russian pop celebrities blog here and have their blogs featured on the blogs home page. Although LiveJournal is a much more widely used service for Russian bloggers. But still it's here (and Mail.ru is among the leading Russian blogging platforms) and it's good enough for a beginning blogger.
Besides, Mail.ru offers a hellish lot of other services, similar to those provided by international portals:
- Answers
- Dictionaries
- Encyclopedias
- Maps
- Photo and video hosting
Instant messenger (Mail.ru Agent) is available to all users with an email account.
I would not say that user interface is perfect here - but it is quite understandable and feature-rich. It resembles Yahoo much more than Google, for example - so I think you understand what I am talking about here.
There are some important disadvantages. First is that the website seems to be overloaded with banner ads - but Russian portals rarely provide and paid-for services and they need cash to support their existence). And second: Mail.ru accounts are used by spammers a lot (and you receive a huge number of spam messages to your inbox). But anyway you rarely see a spam filter similar to Gmail's anywhere but on Gmail, you know.
But still if you are not too choosy when it comes to user interface, you speak Russian and want to join the largest Russian online community (50 millions of accounts created since the portal's launch) - here is the place for you. And I would not tell that an average Russian first-time Internet user is choosy. So when a user starts virtual life, he does it here - and is provided with a vast range of opportunities.
My conclusion? I think the results are impressive. But not everyone is impressed, of course: Pete Cashmore puts it like this:
We can't say we're particularly interested in this Russian email provider and portal, but we're getting emails to say that the South-African media company Naspers will buy 30% of Mail.ru for $165M. The company serves around 24 million people and also has the largest dating and auction sites in Russia.
Sure, he may not be particularly interested. But we can estimate that the portal is worth $550 million - or one third of YouTube's value. Not bad for a local portal, don't you think so?
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Bighorn
kalipso
Mav
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
Svetlana,
Maybe you menat 1 tenth of Youtube and not one third? Youtube was worth $1.65 billion and the russian email was $165 million.
Thanks,
Thank you for your comment and your interest.
And no, I actually meant one third (1/3) of YouTube's price: $165 million is the price of 30% of Mail.ru. So 100% is $550 million - or exactly one third of the price Google paid for YouTube.
Svetlana, thanks for this nice information. Now they also have their own instant messaging client - Mail.ru Agent. The setup file is only 2,95 MB and the application is having many nice features like games, pc to pc calls, webcam support, free SMS and also games that can be played without opening a browser window.
They are developing new services they by day (like money transfer with e-mail) and I think it’s one of the best portals worldwide. Maybe technology and user interface is not perfect but the integration between different functions of the portal and the general usability of the site are great.
Finally, Mail.ru is a very good portal, which is proving that Russians are not only making clones of popular portals (eg. vkontakte.ru - russian facebook) but they also make tremendous things.
Regards
Arda, I am glad you like this post. As a Russian-based person, I actually know of Mail.ru services pretty well, including the Mail.ru agent and portal itself. Honestly, I have removed the agent from my computer as I only had one contact there - I’ve not used my Mail.ru email account for anything but subscription to some services for quite some time now. Besides, if I use all the instant messengers I have accounts with separately, my laptop would not have enough memory to load anything else - thus I use Miranda IM that combines all my messengers in one place.
Besides, I can not agree that Mail.ru is one of the best portals in the world - it can be true for Russia, not the world and definitely not in my taste. I think Mail.Ru has a too crowded interface, I prefer something cleaner. The only advantage of Mail.Ru in my taste is its audience - I believe any Russian-speaking Internet user has an account with Mail.Ru (thus Mail.Ru in Russia can be compared to Google and its global position). But sure, Mail.Ru is very unique and has a special Russian feeling around it - honestly, I don’t think that any heavy user of advanced Web 2.0 services will be able to actually like Mail.Ru because it is too crowded and too complicated.
Anyway I appreciate your feedback, I know that in Russia Mail.Ru means a lot and actually has lots of fans.
I agree with you. Even they provide some web 2.0 features like blogging and photo sharing, it’s still old-style web. But i think the adaptation to web 2.0 will take sometime. As the users’ expectations grow, they will adapt. In the end, the usage of internet in daily life and expectation of the users in Western European countries and US is few steps ahead the Eastern European ones.
Last week i also read a lot about multi-protocol messenger clients. Download Miranda but still not tested. I think soon i will test
I saw that, they also have some Mail.ru add-on.
I think next generation web will be more focused on integration techniques both in applications and devices, the sharing of user databases between portals, internationalization and machine translation.
Thus a French facebook user will post something (mail, sms, posting or anything else) with Skype in French, and a mail.ru agent user will receive it in Russian in his mobile phone, which is translated by machine, writes the answer in russian, and the other side recieves the translated content. So utopic ? =)
Arda, thank you for this comment, I appreciate your continuous attention. The problem with adapting Web 2.0 in Russia is that our expectations are very different. We do not expect a web portal to be clean as Google - we expect something crowded and messy like Mail.ru or Yandex maybe. And we will hardly change those expectations any time soon because there is a language limitation, too - only a small portion of Russian INTERNET users actually use Web 2.0 applications because they are rarely localized into Russian. When we do change our expectations, our portals will start to change, I hope because they will follow the expectations.
Give Miranda a test, it’s worth it. It may take quite some time to get it to the ideal IM client for you and customization can be a bit time-consuming and complicated but it is definitely worth it. And Miranda actually has add-ons for all the protocols I know of, inclding Mail.ru agent, that’s for sure.
And having worked as a professional translator for quite a long time, I can confirm that your idea about machine translation as a basis for communications in the future is SOOOO Utopian
Read my post here about Google translation tool for search. I don’t believe in machine translation at all and knowing at least one common language to use for international communications can be a big plus and I believe it will be the basis for future online networking.
Thanks for your article, Svetlana. About 5 years ago I use Mail.ru for communication with my russian friends. It has one more category function - dating - have a look, it works still.
@Russian Translator: You know, Mail.ru was the first email service I registered an account with and I still use it for some private purposes. And believe me, I am perfectly aware of the services it provides to the Russian-speaking internet users (including the dating one that I certainly do not need as a happily married woman). I believe that in Russia it serves as our own Yahoo - it is a portal for absolutely everything for every novice to find all he or she needs online. It’s definitely not a bad role.
When i wrote that the next generation web will include integrations between portals, what i mentioned was a common integration API. It’s nice to see that Google thought it months before than me so that they are announcing opensocial
I think soon all the social networking portals will be developed or on API’s from main providers. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. AOL and Amazon can also be listed.
It’s just a feeling but I see Yahoo luckier than the others.