One of the major Russian social networks, also known as the Russian Facebook-clone, vKontakte (aka VK) announced upcoming launch of two new advertizing products: their own ad network and retargeting platform.
vKontakte ad network
The ad network is said to be launched in mid-October. It will allow publishers to place blocks of vKontakte ads on their sites. Webmasters will receive 50% of advertising revenue, which is comparable with AdSense and Yandex Advertising Network. At the first stage, the ads will be shown only to logged in to vKontakte users. For those questioning the size of this audience size, VK opened up visitors stats on LiveInternet.ru – please got in and have a look. Nothing is said about targeting options or quality of the publishers in the network.
vKontakte retargeting
Retargeting technology, being somewhat of a hype in the West, is not at all developed in Russia. Just a few weeks ago I received a question about retargeting options in Russia, and I couldn’t really name any big players. Yandex recently launched search retargeting, however it is unlikely that a small or medium size business could benefit from it. The categories available for targeting are just too broad. Now, the game might change with vKontakte entering the field.
The vKontakte retargeting feature, similar (surprise!) to Facebook Exchange, will be launched in December. Facebook Exchange retargeting apparently showed exceeding all expectation results for some advertisers, so it might be an idea to try VK retargeting in the Russian market.
