Online Advertizing is booming in Russia, and, unlike many European markets, there are a few platforms available, that can deliver sufficient amounts of traffic.

Apart from the Market leader Yandex and their Yandex.Direct with massive search and content networks, you have Google AdWords, Begun (content ad network), social PPC on VKontakte and Odnoklassniki.ru, you name it.

Recently Mail.ru announced creation of their new ad platform, which will serve ads in their social network MoiMir. MoiMir is the 4th largest network in Russia and is bigger than FaceBook.

Mail.ru started up as a free email service and with the time turned into Russia’s second largest portal and a  major search engine (although they have not used their own search algorithm until recently, relying on those of Google and Yandex).

In late 2010 Mail.ru filed for IPO. From then on they have been recruiting talents from all over the place, including several top managers from Begun ad network.

Looks like Mail.ru are serious about what they are doing. I believe MoiMir will be able deliver quality traffic and sales, while providing good UI. This new ad serving platform is definitely something I will be looking into.

Context advertizing network BEGUN (second largest PPC platform after Yandex Direct, which belongs to a Russian search engine Rambler) published results of their price research. Price per click is measured in “conditional units” (whatever it is). 1 conditional unit is equal 28 Russian rubles or $0.90.

Among top 25 were some seo services related keywords sich as “seo prices”, “seo” and “context advertizing” (in Russian, obviously).

Generally the most expensive segments are real estate, legal services, security services, finance services, Internet services, software and cars. Top 10 looked as follows:

SEO prices (35,68)
Security alarms (35,00)
SEO (20,04)
Fire alarm (19,93)
Security videosystems (19,07)
Firm liquidation (18,43)
Real estate countryside (17,86)
Trader (16,11)
Forex (Russian spelling) (16,07)
Forex (English spelling)(16,07).

This is perhaps not the most precise translation, but you get the point. SEO, security and real estate… That’s where the money is =)

Yandex.Direct is AdWords of Yandex. It works almost the same way and looks very similar.

This week Yandex has started to show up to 3 sponsored links above organic search results, while before the maximum amount of paid ads was 2. Yandex claims that this will affect only the most competitive keywords, i.e. not more than 2% of all queries.

More sponsored links in Yandex SERPs

According to SearchEngines.ru Internet audience is not very fond of increased amount of paid listings. A large amount of people have screens with resolution lower than 768px (e.g. netbooks users) and cannot see organic search results at all.

In blogs and forums Yandex is being compared with Chinese Baidu, where all 10 top results can be paid listings =)