It became known yesterday who would take the place general director and other key positions on VKontakte. This is not about a simple change of names: where the largest Russian social network will go “after Durov” depends on the new leadership. Apparat has studied all the available information and made conclusions about what to expect.
What happened?
The Mail.Ru Group company is entirely “VKontakte” and immediately took advantage the ability to single-handedly appoint management. Boris Dobrodeev became the chief director of the social network, Andrey Rogozov became the chief operating officer, and Dmitry Sergeev headed the holding company VK.COM.
In the previous months, these same people were involved in the social network as temporary management while VKontakte shareholders were in conflict. Now that their status is officially secured, the new leadership can act more freely and on a larger scale. And since their views differ in many ways from the views of Pavel Durov and his team, there is reason to expect changes.
Who are all these people?
Boris Dobrodeev
new general director of VKontakteBoris Dobrodeev is a member of the board of directors of Mail.Ru Group and the son of the head of VGTRK Oleg Dobrodeev. Last November, he took the position of First Deputy General Director, and has now been promoted.
Andrey Rogozov
new operating director of VKontakteAndrey Rogozov is one of the key employees of VKonakte, who has worked 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 a number of key employees left VKontakte (Nikolay Durov, Ilya Perekopsky, Igor Zhukov and others), he remained one of the few “stars” of the old team.
Dmitry Sergeev
new head of the holding company VK.COMDmitry Sergeev also recently joined the company. 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 became vacant with the dismissal of Ilya Perekopsky. Then he told Forbes that he was appointed personally by Pavel Durov, but did not specify who proposed his candidacy. The obvious option is co-owner of Mail.Ru Group Alisher Usmanov. Sergeev worked at Kommersant, owned by a billionaire.
The difference between the new leaders of VKontakte is obvious: Rogozov is close to the startup culture, Dobrodeev and Sergeev are close to the corporate culture. Rogozov came to the company as a young developer, when it consisted of only a few programmers who were passionate about the idea, 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 transfer of management to Mail.Ru Group caused a lot of fears and expectations among users of the social network related to the difference in their approaches. Pavel Durov is known as an opponent of aggressive monetization, government regulation (he is the author of the words “the best legislative initiative is its absence”), censorship, as well as
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Managing Director of VKontakte Andrei Rogozov accused Roskomnadzor of misunderstanding the principles of how the Internet works
Managing Director of the social network VKontakte Andrei Rogozov accused Roskomnadzor of misunderstanding the principles of the Internet. Previously, the department blocked one of the company’s IP addresses, which is why some users lost access to it. Rogozov emphasized that transferring keys to decrypt user messages, which the FSB requires from Telegram, is impossible by definition.
Andrey Rogozov will become the General Director of VKontakte
Rogozov currently holds the post of director of development at VKontakte. After Pavel Durov left, VKontakte was headed by Dmitry Sergeev, but only in the status of executive director.
Andrey Rogozov will head VKontakte
The VKontakte social network will be headed by its operating director Andrey Rogozov. “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, Chief Operating Officer 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 General Director of VKontakte, which became vacant after the departure of Pavel Durov, will be filled by Andrey Rogozov. This news was reported by a source extremely close to Mail.ru Group.
On this moment Rogozov works at VKontakte as the post of development director. It is noteworthy that after the departure of the founder of the social network Durov, Dmitry Sergeev took over his responsibilities. However, he took the chair not of the general director, but of the executive director. Now, VKontakte will receive a full-fledged general director who will perform direct responsibilities and functions. It is worth noting that today Mail.ru Group completely 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 was at the origins of the social network and worked as the director of operations, responsible for technical development and the emergence of new functions on the website and applications of the social network.
Official: 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, Chief Operating Officer of the social network, to the position of Managing Director.
Mail.ru could not appoint Boris Dobrodeev as head of the social network for more than a year due to a protracted shareholder conflict
Moscow. September 18. website - Boris Dobrodeev, son of the general director of VGTRK Oleg Dobrodeev, was appointed general director of VKontakte LLC, the position of operational director of the social network was taken by Andrey Rogozov, who previously headed the development department. These appointments ended a conflict between 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 chief operating officer of Vkontakte, joined the company in 2007 and was at the forefront of the creation of the social network, and in recent years has managed the development of services. IN new position He will lead product development and lead all product and technology areas of the company.
The position of executive director will be abolished, and Dmitry Sergeev, who has held it since January 2014, will become director of the holding company VK.COM.
Last Tuesday, the ownership structure of VKontakte changed - Mail.ru Group for $1.47 billion from United fund 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 general director. Mail.ru proposed to appoint him as 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 monetization strategy for the social network in order to return the money spent. UCP, which last year bought a stake in VKontakte from the co-founders of the social network for a rumored $900 million, has earned more than $500 million from its investment.
In addition, UCP, Mail.ru and former general director of VK Pavel Durov agreed to immediately terminate all legal proceedings. arose back in October 2013. The UCP Foundation believed that Durov paid too much attention to his third-party projects and did not do enough on VKontakte. After this, the founder of the social network announced that he had sold 12% of VK to Ivan Tavrin.
VKontakte's revenue in 2013 increased by 14%, to 3.8 billion rubles, EBITDA increased by 32%, to 1 billion rubles, net profit amounted to 53 million rubles. In the first half of 2014, the social network's income amounted to 2 billion rubles, EBITDA - 694 million rubles, EBITDA margin - 34.7%, net profit - 248 million rubles.
How Mail.ru gained control over VKontakte
Mail.ru's entry into VKontakte began with a share of 24.99%. 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 99.9% of Mail.ru shares, as well as 100% of the Odnoklassniki social network and changed its name to Mail.ru Group in anticipation 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.
At the same time, since 2010, Mail.ru Group systematically began to increase its share in VK - the company exercised an option to acquire 7.5% of the social network and received another option - for 7.44%, it was exercised in 2011 . The total amount of these two transactions was more than $220 million - they were carried out based on the valuation of Vkontakte at $1.5 billion.
At the beginning of 2011, in an interview with Forbes magazine, Mail.ru Chief Executive Officer Dmitry Grishin said that it would be strategically correct for the holding to acquire control in VKontakte. Pavel Durov reacted very negatively to this idea. He stated that the social network is not for sale, and later accompanied his response with a photo of him raising his middle finger.
It seemed that everything was heading towards 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, it was announced that Ilya Shcherbovich’s UCP fund had purchased a 48% stake in VKontakte. Mirilashvili and Leviev bypassed the right of first refusal of Mail.ru and Durov (owned 12% of VK) by not offering them their shares for redemption and keeping negotiations with UCP secret.
Neither Mail.ru nor Durov had a normal relationship with UCP. " Mutual language it is impossible to find new shareholders - they prefer to act exclusively by threats and pressure,” Durov told the Vedomosti newspaper. According to him, UCP “inundated him with questions” related to the Telegram messenger launched by Durov’s Digital Fortress (DF) foundation.
Moving from words to deeds, in April the UCP filed a lawsuit in the court of the British Virgin Islands, demanding to transfer to VKontakte the Telegram, which, as the fund claimed, Durov created using the resources of the social network. Durov responded by filing a lawsuit, supported by Mail.ru, demanding a review of the UCP deal to acquire 48% of VK due to a violation of the pre-emption order.
UCP's claims also related to violations identified by the fund in the work of the social network in 2011-2014. These include withdrawing funds from the company, using its resources for personal purposes, and working with affiliated companies without proper shareholder approval.
In parallel with the UCP’s attacks on Durov, there was a process of “moving away” the founder from VKontakte. In January, the general director of Megafon (also controlled by Alisher Usmanov) Ivan Tavrin bought his 12% stake from the founder of the social network. True, Tavrin did not remain a shareholder of VK for long - three months later he sold this stake to Mail.ru for 12.4 billion rubles, valuing the social network at $2.88 billion.
On April 1, Durov sent shareholders a statement 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 his review was not accepted. Durov said that he learned about it from the press, but “the shareholders did not have the courage to do it directly.” He later said that he intends to launch a mobile social network this year and has no plans to return to Russia.
Head of the VKontakte development department Andrey Rogozov answered questions about the creation and development of the 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 expand the functionality of the site. The first version of the VKontakte platform appeared at the beginning of 2008, when we opened hosting for Flash applications with a basic set of functions. This was enough for a number of games to take off; the same notorious “Happy Farmer” already gained hundreds of thousands of users. In the spring of 2009, the platform was radically updated, developers received significantly greater opportunities for integration with the site - and the market literally exploded. Up to this point, there were 2-3 companies, and for them, developing applications on the Internet was not their core business. 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 functions planned for the updated version, Pavel suggested giving applications access to votes (votes are a virtual currency that was used in paid VKontakte services - ratings and gifts - Chaskor) and see what comes of it . A couple of weeks later, we looked at the transaction amounts and decided to charge a “sales tax,” and a couple of months later Pavel was already telling an interested Mark Zuckerberg about this experience.
- Do you think your success has pushed 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 introduced a tax on transactions between the user and the application.
- However, Apple takes 30% from application authors, and you take 50. Isn’t that too much?
- It depends on what you compare it to. In China, too, there are networks that took 80%. It is more important for us that current conditions do not prevent applications from conducting successful business, and VKontakte brings more profit to application developers on the RuNet than other social networks.
It seems to us that it is more correct to soften the initially strict conditions than to lure developers to our platform with the absence of a commission, and then suddenly change the rules of the game, as our colleagues did. On our site, the commission percentage will be revised only in favor of the developers.
- Does this mean that developers can expect new conditions soon?
- Now targeted advertising is becoming the main source of income for VKontakte. I accept that our commission may change in the foreseeable future.
- Regarding high earnings on your platform, how much money do the applications earn?
- We are reluctant to disclose our financial indicators. I can only say that in March we paid over $2.5 million to third-party application developers. A year ago the figure was two times less. And now it continues to grow every month.
- Has anyone managed to repeat the success of “The Happy Farmer”?
- The current leader of the section - “Prison” - managed not only to repeat the success of “Happy Farmer”, but also to surpass it in all respects. This application proved that to create a successful product it is not necessary to have a solid background and financial support. For talented developers, there is no such thing as a barrier to entry into the platform. "Prison" managed to gather a gigantic audience in just a few months.
- The counter shows 6 million installations.
- Installations are not as important as app traffic. And these figures 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 to use social mechanics (attracting friends, etc.) - they had no competitors at the very beginning and less control over promotion methods. And Tyuryaga managed to grab a key market share within three months of its launch in a very competitive environment.
- Does “Prison” earn more than “Farmer” during its heyday?
- I cannot disclose specific figures, I will only say that Tyuryaga is several times more profitable.
Returning to the rule changes on the platform. You know, many say that the rules of the VKontakte game change too often and this harms 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 function X 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 become 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.
This often resulted in abuses that undermined trust in the platform as a whole. People who encountered fraudulent apps or apps that left advertising messages without their knowledge were reluctant to open the apps afterward and even less willing to vote for them. The introduction of restrictions in these cases has always had a positive effect on the total revenue of the site’s applications. Although lovers of semi-legal methods were hardly happy.
- Can we say that the period of experimentation is over and the rules of the game have stabilized?
- The platform is developing - after new opportunities, abuses arise, to which we are forced to respond. But this does not affect conscientious players. For the last year and a half, we have been revising the terms of the platform only in favor of developers. We have abolished fees for app branding, allowed the placement of any external links and any third-party advertising, simplified pre-moderation and plan to abolish it altogether - the market is ripe for this.
Just recently, links to applications disappeared from user pages. I've heard complaints about this from developers who have lost additional opportunity attracting new audiences.
- Yes, this is quite a resonant change. We decided to move towards simplification home page user and refused to use the application block in its previous form. Instead, we've significantly redesigned the main app section, making it easier to access the apps you visit most often. More added 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 terms, the selection is based on a 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 light. 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 doesn't have it, they're in trouble.
Is VKontakte planning 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, six months ago we closed our “native” services “Opinions”, “Questions”, “Suggestions”, which were popular. But they provided access to the entire database accumulated during the work of “Questions” and “Suggestions”, in such a way that third-party developers were able not only to completely recreate the original services, but also to 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 were, in particular, “Anonymous Opinions”, “Suggestions”, “Questions”. There was a feeling that they were in demand, they were worth doing - this year all these services were disabled.
We will soon be closing the “Ads” section - this is not the sector we would like to deal with, we will completely provide it to third-party companies. Our paid services - ratings and gifts - have been gradually winding down over the past months. Operations with ratings already occur only through third-party applications (it is not available in the native VKontakte interface), and gifts migrate every couple of months to less attractive parts of the page, one day this niche will be freed up for third-party developers. We don’t want to spread out in all directions; we prefer to focus on basic services.
In general, we are interested in providing capabilities that are not easy for applications to create on their own.
Many people 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 to access 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 - the iPhone application and i.vkontakte.ru - are made entirely using the API. Basically, full version Our API today provides the conditions for creating another “VKontakte”.
Interviewed by Elnara Petrova, editor of DP VKontakte
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