International Social Networks are Unwanted Invaders in Russia, Too

Since I am not in the US, it is always fascinating to see some international news going big among US journalists and readers - so today's article in the New Your Times titled "An Innocent Abroad" was a great refreshment to me. The article has a lot of valid points about how the internet Anglosphere views the rest of the internet - I mean those of us that are wired but don't have English as their native language. And unfortunately it is very much obvious that for the Anglosphere we are either non-existent or virtually non-existent - unless we can deliver our thoughts to them in English. But what the Anglosphere does not realize is that same as it does not care about the non-English speaking world, we don't care about it as much as it prefers to believe.

I myself don't really belong to the Russian-language segment of internet and even though I know we also have some web celebrities and our own A-listers, on the international scale it often looks like children playing in the sandbox more than real business that internet is in the valley. And even though we in Russia have one of the fastest growing advertising markets and even Google notices the potential, the fact remains - the Russian segment is not viewed seriously.

So I guess when a big international social network like Facebook or MySpace decides to launch a Russian version, we here are all supposed to feel kind of blessed by them. But do we really feel so? Unfortunately for the big international players, no, we don't. As Serkan Toto proves today on TechCrunch, in Japan the big players, MySpace and Facebook are barely noticed compared to the local social network Mixi.

We have already spoken here about our suspicion that the international social networks are not actually wanted very much on the local markets. I have decided to see if those suspicions were actually correct so I have made a similar graph on Google Trends for Russia to compare the two of the most popular local social networks, Odnoklassniki.ru and Vkontakte.ru, with the international giants MySpace and Facebook that both have Russian versions, by the way, so that gives some ground to compare them at all. You will easily see that the results below are very similar to those in Japan:

And even though we can see that Facebook has started to at least show some growth in June when it launched the Russian version, MySpace localized the network for Russia back in January and the line is still as flat as it was. But that certainly does not mean that we do not have any market for social networking: the local Odnoklassniki.ru and Vkontakte are doing very well and both have grown immensely over the last year. True, we can see slight decrease in traffic in June for both of them but I am pretty sure it is simply seasonal - spring and summer normally make people here spend more time offline after the long winter nights with a laptop and a mug of hot chocolate.

So I guess this makes my point pretty obvious and evident: the international social networks may hope that their widely recognized brands will help them achieve similar results on the local markets. But they don't think of one simple fact: those local players actually have local offices, local marketing and PR and, what's more, support of local mainstream media and blogosphere. And even if some news outlets choose to announce the big openings of the international giants in Russia, it does not mean that users will leave their current networks to find a new home on MySpace or Facebook. It took our local internet entrepreneurs quite some time and money to finally reach mainstream adoption of social networking as a trend itself and I don't think they will give their ground to newcomers from abroad all that easily.

Moreover, I don't see any chances for the foreigners to win here at all. What I see could be a reasonable strategy for Facebook, for example, is to simply buy the local Vkontakte which has a very strong user base and is in its core a clone of Facebook (see the screenshot below, I'm sure it will look familiar).

I know Facebook could choose to sue Vkontakte over its interface and could also win and make the guys change the design. But will that actually help to the growth of Facebook itself? To the contrary, I believe it will only result in rejection of the brand by the local users. But if Facebook buys Vkontakte instead (if interested, you can find some additional details on Quintura blog) and imports all the 15 million of users of the Russian networks, it will not only get a significant addition to its own user base but one of the leading positions on the Russian market as well. As for the users, I don't think that the majority of them will notice the new logo too soon. In fact, I think it could be a preferred way for the international social networking giants to grow - either buy local networks or partner with them.

So I don't see any reason for Facebook not to make this obvious decision and start negotiating the price for Vkontakte if it actually wants to achieve international presence. So if you don't live in the US yourself, leave your comment below about the similarities or distinctions in your country. The comments from US residents are equally welcome: let us know what you think of the inability of the US-based giants to break into the local markets easily.