The day before it became known who will take the place CEO and other key positions on VKontakte. This is not about a simple change of names: it depends on the new leadership where the largest Russian social network “after Durov” will go. Apparat has looked at all the information available and has drawn conclusions about what to expect.
What happened?
Mail.Ru Group is entirely on VKontakte and immediately took advantage the ability to single-handedly appoint leadership. Boris Dobrodeev became the chief director of the social network, Andrey Rogozov became the operating director, and Dmitry Sergeev headed the holding company VK.COM.
These same people in the previous months were engaged in the social network as an interim management, while the shareholders of VKontakte were in conflict. Now that their status has been formalized, the new leadership can act more freely and on a larger scale. And since their views differ in many respects from the views of Pavel Durov and his team, there are reasons to expect changes.
Who are all these people?
Boris Dobrodeev
new CEO of VKontakteBoris Dobrodeev is a member of the board of directors of Mail.Ru Group and the son of Oleg Dobrodeev, head of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company. In November last year, he took the position of First Deputy General Director, and now he has gone on promotion.
Andrey Rogozov
new COO of VKontakteAndrey Rogozov is one of the key employees of VKonakte, who has been working in the company since 2007 (the social network appeared in 2006). According to current and former colleagues, in recent years his role has been very large, which became especially noticeable when Pavel Durov began to devote more and more time to the Telegram project. After leaving VKontakte, a number of key employees (Nikolai Durov, Ilya Perekopsky, Igor Zhukov and others) remained one of the few "stars" of the old team.
Dmitry Sergeev
new head of holding company VK.COMDmitry Sergeev also joined the company recently. Previously, he headed the Kommersant publishing house, redesigned Gazeta.Ru, and led sports and gaming projects at Rambler-Afisha-SUP. At the beginning of this, he came to the position of executive director of VKontakte, which was vacated with the dismissal of Ilya Perekopsky. Then he told Forbes that Pavel Durov personally appointed him, but did not specify who proposed his candidacy. The obvious option is the co-owner of Mail.Ru Group Alisher Usmanov. Sergeev worked at Kommersant, owned by the billionaire.
The difference between the new leaders of VKontakte is obvious: Rogozov is close to the startup culture, Dobrodeev and Sergeyev are close to the corporate culture. Rogozov joined the company as a young developer, when it consisted of only a few enthusiastic programmers, and the concept of "manager" was absent. Dobrodeev and Sergeev belong to the older generation of managers and immediately came as managers; Mail.ru Group, whose interests they represent, has thousands of employees.
What do users expect from the new guide?
The final transition of management to Mail.Ru Group caused a lot of fears and expectations among social network users related to the difference in their approaches. Pavel Durov is known as an opponent of aggressive monetization, state regulation (he is the author of the words “the best legislative initiative is its absence”), censorship, and also
"Connections / Partners"
"News"
Andrey Rogozov, managing director of VKontakte, accused Roskomnadzor of not understanding the principles of the Internet
Andrey Rogozov, managing director of the social network VKontakte, accused Roskomnadzor of not understanding the principles of the Internet. Earlier, the agency blocked one of the company's IP addresses, which prevented some users from accessing it. Rogozov stressed that the transfer of keys to decrypt user messages, which the FSB requires from Telegram, is impossible by definition.
Andrey Rogozov becomes CEO of VKontakte
Rogozov now holds the post of development director for VKontakte. After the departure of Pavel Durov, VKontakte was headed by Dmitry Sergeev, but only in the status of an executive director.
Andrey Rogozov will head VKontakte
The social network "VKontakte" will be headed by its operating director Andrey Rogozov. “In connection with the transition of Boris Dobrodeev to the position of CEO (CEO Russia) of Mail.Ru Group, the company is changing the management system of VKontakte and announces the appointment of Andrey Rogozov, the operating director of the social network, to the position of managing director,” the company said in a statement. .
Andrey Rogozov — General Director of VKontakte
The vacant position of CEO of VKontakte, which became vacant after the departure of Pavel Durov, will be taken by Andrey Rogozov. This news was reported by a source very close to Mail.ru Group.
On the this moment Rogozov works at VKontakte as a development director. It is noteworthy that after the departure of the founder of the social network Durov, Dmitry Sergeev took over his duties. However, he took the chair not of the general, but of the executive director. Now, VKontakte will receive a full-fledged general director who will perform direct duties and functions. It is worth noting that today Mail.ru Group fully bought out the shares of VKontakte, becoming the absolute owner of this social network.
Andrey Rogozov is the new head of VKontakte
Mail.Ru Group changed the VKontakte management system and appointed Andrey Rogozov to the position of Managing Director. Rogozov stood at the origins of the social network and worked as an operations director, responsible for technical development and the emergence of new features on the site and in the social network applications.
Officially: Andrey Rogozov will manage VKontakte
Mail.Ru Group announced the appointment of Andrey Rogozov to the position of Managing Director of the VKontakte social network.
In connection with the transition of Boris Dobrodeev to the position of General Director (CEO Russia) of Mail.Ru Group, the company is changing the management system of VKontakte and announces the appointment of Andrey Rogozov, COO of the social network, to the position of Managing Director.
Mail.ru could not appoint Boris Dobrodeev as the head of the social network for more than a year due to a protracted conflict of shareholders
Moscow. September 18th. website - Boris Dobrodeev, the son of Oleg Dobrodeev, general director of the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company, has been appointed general director of VKontakte LLC, and Andrey Rogozov, who previously headed the development department, has taken the post of operational director of the social network. These appointments ended the conflict of shareholders that lasted more than a year, the press service of VK emphasizes.
"Boris Dobrodeev has been appointed General Director of VKontakte LLC, who has actually been acting as General Director since April of this year. Boris Dobrodeev will lead the development of the company's strategy, financial and commercial activities VKontakte," the message says.
Rogozov, appointed to the position of operating director of Vkontakte, joined the company in 2007 and was at the origins of the social network, and in recent years managed the development of services. IN new position he will lead product development and lead all product and technology lines of the company.
The position of the executive director will be abolished, and Dmitry Sergeev, who has held it since January 2014, will become the director of the VK.COM holding company.
Last Tuesday, the ownership structure of VKontakte changed - Mail.ru Group for $1.47 billion United Foundation Capital Partners (UCP). Prior to this, Mail.ru did not have operational control over VK (there were two representatives from each shareholder on the board of directors). Since April, after the social network, Dobrodeev was appointed acting CEO. Mail.ru offered to appoint him CEO, but UCP blocked his appointment.
To gain control of VKontakte, Mail.ru spent its savings (26.3 billion rubles as of June 30) and borrowed 22.2 billion rubles from Gazprom Bank for four years at 11.5% per annum. Now the holding will have to come up with and implement a social network monetization strategy in order to return the money spent. UCP, which last year bought a stake in VKontakte from the social network's co-founders for a reported $900 million, has made more than $500 million from its investment.
In addition, UCP, Mail.ru and the former CEO of VK Pavel Durov agreed to immediately stop all litigation. originated in October 2013. The UCP Foundation believed that Durov was paying too much attention to his side projects and was not doing enough on VKontakte. After that, the founder of the social network announced that he had sold 12% of VK to Ivan Tavrin.
In 2013, VKontakte's revenue increased by 14%, to 3.8 billion rubles, EBITDA grew by 32%, to 1 billion rubles, and net profit amounted to 53 million rubles. In the first half of 2014, the social network's revenues amounted to 2 billion rubles, EBITDA - 694 million rubles, EBITDA margin - 34.7%, net profit - 248 million rubles.
How Mail.ru got control of VKontakte
Mail.ru's entry into VKontakte began with a 24.99% stake. Then the buyer was the company Digital Sky Technologies (DST) of Yuri Milner and Grigory Finger, which actively invested in various Internet projects. It was DST that acquired a stake in VKontakte in 2007 for $16.3 million.
Later, DST included Alisher Usmanov, the Chinese Tencent and the South African media holding Naspers. In 2010, DST consolidated a 99.9% stake in Mail.ru, as well as 100% of the Odnoklassniki social network, and changed its name to Mail.ru Group ahead of its IPO. As a result, at that time, the holding company, in addition to Mail.ru and Odnoklassniki, owned shares in ICQ, HeadHunter, VKontakte, payment system OSMP and a number of other assets.
Then, since 2010, Mail.ru Group has been systematically increasing its share in VK - the company exercised an option to acquire 7.5% of the social network and received another option - by 7.44%, it was exercised in 2011 . The total amount of these two transactions amounted to more than $220 million - they were carried out based on the assessment of "Vkontakte" at $1.5 billion.
In early 2011, in an interview with Forbes magazine, Mail.ru CEO Dmitry Grishin said that it would be strategically correct for the holding to acquire control over VKontakte. Pavel Durov reacted very negatively to this idea. He stated that the social network is not for sale, and later accompanied his answer with a photo with a raised middle finger.
It seemed that everything was going to the fact that the main owner of Mail.ru himself would buy out the shares of VK co-founders Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev and gain control over the social network. However, in April 2013, the purchase of a 48% stake in VKontakte by Ilya Shcherbovich's UCP fund was announced. Mirilashvili and Leviev circumvented the right of first refusal to Mail.ru and Durov (who owned 12% of VK) by not offering them their shares for redemption and by keeping negotiations with UCP secret.
Neither Mail.ru nor Durov developed normal relations with UCP. " Mutual language with new shareholders it is not possible to find - they prefer to act exclusively by the method of threats and pressure," Durov told the Vedomosti newspaper. According to him, the UCP "filled him with questions" related to the Telegram messenger, launched by Durov's Digital Fortress (DF) fund.
Turning from words to deeds, UCP filed a lawsuit in April in the British Virgin Islands, demanding to transfer Telegram to VKontakte, which, according to the fund, Durov created using the resources of the social network. Durov, in response, filed a lawsuit, supported by Mail.ru, demanding a review of the UCP deal to acquire 48% of VK due to a violation of the preemptive buyout procedure.
The claims of UCP also concerned violations identified by the fund in the work of the social network in 2011-2014. These include the withdrawal of funds from the company, the use of its resources for personal purposes, and dealing with affiliated companies without proper shareholder approval.
In parallel with the UCP attacks on Durov, the founder was being "pushed away" from VKontakte. In January, the CEO of MegaFon (also controlled by Alisher Usmanov) Ivan Tavrin bought out his 12% stake from the founder of the social network. True, Tavrin did not stay as a VK shareholder for long - three months later he sold this package to Mail.ru for 12.4 billion rubles, valuing the social network at $2.88 billion.
On April 1, Durov sent a statement to the shareholders about his resignation from VKontakte, but two days later he announced that he had changed his mind, and a month later it turned out that his application was granted, and the response was not accepted. Durov said that he learned about it from the press, and "the shareholders did not have the courage to do it directly." He later stated that he intended to launch a mobile social network this year and had no plans to return to Russia.
Andrey Rogozov, head of the development department at VKontakte, answered questions about the creation and development of an application platform.
How much money third-party developers bring to the site, who wins in competition, and why VKontakte does not create applications for its own API.
- What is the VKontakte platform and how long has it been in existence?
- The platform allows any third-party developers to create integrated applications: for example, games that use information about the user's friends, or applications that extend the functionality of the site. The first version of the VKontakte platform appeared in early 2008, when we opened hosting for Flash applications with a basic set of functions. This was enough to take off a number of games, the same notorious "Happy Farmer" already gained hundreds of thousands of users. In the spring of 2009, the platform was radically updated, developers got much more opportunities for integration with the site - and the market literally exploded. Until that moment, there were 2-3 companies, and for them the development of applications on the Internet was not a core occupation. Within six months after the launch of our API 2.0, several dozen successful startups with millions in profits.
- And then you decided to force them to share this profit?
- When we were finishing work on the features planned for the updated version, Pavel suggested giving applications access to votes (votes - a virtual currency that was used in paid VKontakte services - rating and gifts. - Chaskor) and see what would come of it . A couple of weeks later, we looked at the transaction amounts and decided to take a “sales tax”, and a couple of months later Pavel was already talking about this experience to the interested Mark Zuckerberg.
- Do you think your success prompted Facebook to transfer developers to virtual currency with a tax?
- The idea itself is quite obvious. They say that in China this model worked before us. More recently, Apple also introduced a tax on transactions between the user and the application.
- However, Apple takes 30% from application authors, and you - 50. Isn't that too much?
- It depends on what you compare it to. In the same China, there are networks that took 80%. It is more important for us that the current conditions do not prevent applications from successful business, and VKontakte brings more profit to application developers in Runet than other social networks.
It seems to us more correct to soften the initially harsh conditions than to lure developers to our platform by the absence of a commission, and then abruptly change the rules of the game, as our colleagues did. On our site, the percentage of the commission will be reviewed only in favor of the developers.
- Does this mean that developers can expect new conditions soon?
- Now the main source of income for VKontakte is targeted advertising. I admit that in the foreseeable future our commission may change.
- In terms of high earnings on your platform, how much money do applications earn?
- We are reluctant to disclose our financial performance. All I can say is that in March we paid over $2.5 million to third-party app developers. A year ago, the figure was two times less. And now every month it continues to grow.
- Has anyone been able to repeat the success of The Happy Farmer?
- The current leader of the section - "Tyuryaga" - managed not only to repeat the success of "The Happy Farmer", but also to surpass it in all respects. This application proved that you don't need a solid background and financial support to create a successful product. For talented developers, there is no such thing as a platform entry threshold. "Tyuryaga" managed to gather a huge audience in just a few months.
- The counter shows 6 million installations.
- Installs are not as important as app traffic. And these numbers are comparable to what the "Happy Farmer" had in his better times. It should also be taken into account that Farmer was the first VKontakte application that used social mechanics (inviting friends, etc.) - they had no competitors at the very beginning and had less control over promotion methods. And Tyuryaga managed to capture a key market share within three months of its launch in a very competitive environment.
- "Tyuryaga" earns more than "Farmer" in its heyday?
- I can't disclose specific figures, I can only say that "Tyuryaga" is several times more profitable.
Returning to the changes in the rules on the platform. You know, many say that the rules of the VKontakte game change too often and this hurts business.
- At the beginning of the development of the platform, we explored possible options for user interaction with applications, conducted experiments in the spirit of: "Let's give applications the X function and see how they will use it."
The myth that “everything has already been discovered and invented” has existed at all times in many areas of human activity. It can be very attractive to people who want to justify their inaction. However, the world is changing rapidly and new methods and solutions are becoming possible every day. This allows leaders not only to regularly invent new game worlds and mechanics, but also to apply original approaches to already known ones.
Often the result was abuse that undermined the credibility of the platform as a whole. People who were exposed to fraudulent apps or apps that left promotional messages without their knowledge were reluctant to open the apps afterwards and even less willing to vote for them. The introduction of restrictions in these cases has always had a positive effect on the total income of the site's applications. Although lovers of semi-legal methods were hardly happy.
- Can we say that the period of experiments is over and the rules of the game have stabilized?
- The platform is evolving - following new opportunities, abuses arise, to which we are forced to respond. But this does not affect conscientious players. Over the past year and a half, we have been reviewing the terms of the platform only in favor of developers. We have canceled the application branding fee, allowed any external links and any third-party advertising, simplified pre-moderation and plan to abolish it altogether - the market is ripe for this.
More recently, links to applications from user pages have disappeared. I heard complaints about this from developers who have lost additional opportunity attracting a new audience.
- Yes, this is quite a resonant change. We have decided to move towards simplification home page user and refused to use the application block in its previous form. Instead, we have significantly redesigned the main section of applications, making it easier to access those that the user visits more often. added more convenient way viewing notifications from applications, the user has instant access to the application catalog and various ratings. In addition, we have developed the first version of the recommendation system, which suggests objects of interest to the user, including applications.
- And what are the recommendations based on? Is this some new type of promotion?
- In general, the sampling is based on the collaborative filtering method. This technique is used to generate a list of applications that are similar to those that the user visits frequently. We analyze the data and compile a similarity matrix between applications, on the basis of which the lists of recommendations are built in the future. This algorithm is able to learn on its own, so over time the system will produce more and more relevant results.
Is the application platform a significant factor in the success of VKontakte in the Russian market? social networks? Both Mail.Ru and Odnoklassniki opened their APIs much later.
- Perhaps, but we do not consider the platform in this vein. It quickly became clear that third-party developers would run their applications on all available sites, without giving any of the networks any advantage. But a good platform is like nuclear weapon: if one of your competitors does not have it, then they are in trouble.
Does VKontakte plan to enter the application market? Mail.Ru successfully competes with independent developers on its own sites and increases profits.
- Such moves undermine the credibility of the platform and destroy the ecosystem of a level playing field. We are moving in a different direction - we are closing the native services of VKontakte, leaving the API for accessing data and more space for third-party developers.
- Closing services - are we talking about opinions and questions?
- Including, but this is not the main thing. Indeed, half a year ago we closed the "native" services "Opinions", "Questions", "Suggestions", which were popular. But they provided access to the entire database accumulated during the work of the "Questions" and "Suggestions", in such a way that third-party developers could not only completely recreate the original services, but also significantly expand them.
Sections that you do not use yourself, too, can not be done. There was a period in the history of the site when developers created services not entirely for themselves - these are, in particular, "Anonymous opinions", "Suggestions", "Questions". There was a feeling that they were in demand, they should be done - this year all these services were turned off.
Soon we will close the "Announcements" section - this is not a sector that we would like to deal with, we will completely leave it to third-party companies. Our paid services - rating and gifts - have been gradually phasing out over the past months. Rating operations already take place only through third-party applications (it is not in the native VKontakte interface), and gifts migrate to less attractive parts of the page every couple of months, one day this niche will be freed up for third-party developers. We do not want to spread in all directions, we prefer to focus on basic services.
In general, we are interested in providing features that are not easy for applications to create on their own.
Many are concerned about the issue of access to confidential information of application developers. Can developers see, for example, personal correspondence of users?
- The user must always explicitly allow the application access to their data. There are different levels of such confirmation, depending on the importance of the data. Access to such key things as personal correspondence can only be obtained by verified partner applications, in which we can be 100% sure.
By the way, our versions for mobile devices - an application for iPhone and i.vkontakte.ru - are made entirely on the API. Basically, full version our API today provides the conditions for creating another VKontakte.
Interviewed by Elnara Petrova, editor of the DP VKontakte
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