Yandex Reports 80% Revenue Growth for 2008
by
on February 05, 2009,
It looks like Google model - build the most popular search engine and sell contextual ads alongside search results and everywhere people will want to put them - works perfectly for the Russian search engine Yandex, even if it seems to be less magnificent for Google itself these days.
Today Yandex has reported (in Russian) quite impressive preliminary financial results for 2008, featuring a huge figure of revenue growth by 80%. The total revenue amounted to more than $300 million - with over 85% of this amount coming from contextual advertising. The increased revenues come from the growing numbers of advertisers: in 2009 the number of publishers from the Yandex contextual advertising network increased by more than 50%. At that Yandex seems to be generous enough as it is ready to share its impressive revenues with its publishing partners and reports that their revenues almost tripled in 2008 as well.
But the best part is that Yandex also seems to be in quite a solid position for 2009 as due to the crisis people do more searches online - for new jobs or better deals for the products they want - and with Yandex being the most popular search engine here (yes, Russia is one of the 4 countries in the world where Google is not the number one among search engines) it is positioned to do pretty well even in recession. And while Yandex seems to follow Google steps everywhere and adds all the possible services it can think of to its portfolio, I hope that Yandex will be wise enough to only stick to those that can generate revenue not to get into the situation where it has to close some services people already love.
But to me the most intriguing question now is if this loud announcement in the beginning of the year means that Yandex still has some plans about the IPO later this year. Some of you may remember the story of Yandex plans for a huge IPO rumored for $3-$5 billion but it was delayed for quite obvious reasons. I don’t have any information about Yandex IPO plans now but I don’t think they have forgotten about these plans - they have merely postponed it. And such optimistic announcements with huge figures may mean that an IPO will happen sooner rather than later.
