August 15, 2006 at 15:25Yuri Zisser: “We have chosen the Yahoo business model”
The largest Belarusian portal Tut.By was created by two students and a freshman programmer. A couple of months after its opening, the new site became the leader in traffic. Now, according to his leaders, he controls about a third of all traffic on the Internet and shows almost half of all Belarusian online advertising. The founder of the portal, Yuri Zisser, is confident that he was able to successfully adopt the business model of Yahoo, and his company of 18 people will give many a head start in terms of profit per employee.
For all the time since the start of work on October 5, 2000, Tut.By did not attract absolutely any external investments. The only investor was Yuri Zisser. It was he who, six years ago, organized this project under the roof of his company "Reliable Programs", which since 1992 has been producing mainly banking software.
The project came to payback only at the end of 2002, and soon Tut.By began to bring so much money that Yuri in January 2005 sold his banking business to his competitors and devoted himself entirely to a new business. Thus, his company has now become a real Internet company, which plans to get about $ 500 thousand only from online advertising this year. Probably, its creator had conceived in the late 90's when he witnessed the “gold rush” in America with his own eyes dotcoms and saw purple taxis with the Yahoo logo driving around the streets of New York.
Now Yuri Zisser spends all days in an office in the very center of Minsk. The entrance to the building is from the side of the Catholic Church, near the monument to Lenin, under which the Belarusian builders, by order of the Old Man, dug a huge shopping complex in the manner of Manezhnaya Square. Yuri Zisser, along with his permanent assistant Kirill Voloshin (deputy director of Reliable Programs and general director of Tut.By), drinks tea and cake and recalls how they started this business.
There are legends that the idea of creating a portal came to Yuri during one of the many business trips to America?
Yuri Zisser: Actually, we have a section with the official history on our site. It clearly states that on March 8, 2000, I read the forum of the Computer News newspaper (KV) and there I saw one remark. Someone wrote that, they say, I have a super idea and I will give it to anyone who undertakes to realize it.
Kirill Voloshin: (laughs) And I knew another version of the creation of the portal ...
Yu.Z. Cyril, you would sometimes read your own site. In our section “History” this version is stated, and even there is a link to that forum “KV”, where that notorious message is published.
Then I wrote to the same forum and left my coordinates there for communication. Two days later, Sergey Dmitriev came to me [this is the author’s pseudonym of a famous Belarusian journalist and businessman - approx. AA] and said: let's open a free mail server.
Was this his posting on the forum?
Yu.Z. Yes him. But I thought: what the hell to create a mailer, he does not bring any money! In general, since the end of 1999 I began to pretend that it was necessary to "stir up" something on the Internet, but I did not know from which end to approach. I saw what was happening in America: there, in the late 90s, ten thousand dot-coms appeared simultaneously. The idea of a free email service did not inspire me at all. It was necessary to create something more serious. And Dmitriev brought one of his colleagues with him.
K.V. Another journalist.
Yu.Z. Yes, he brought Andrei Kononovich and said that on this his function is exhausted. He wanted to do only mail, and he considers the portal to be the wrong idea and will not take part in this, turned around and left, and we didn’t see him before the portal was launched. And Andrei Kononovich took up this matter as a project manager. The first-year student of BSUIR Danila Rudenko, whom he knew from birth, became our leading programmer. I knew about his talent, because even before that he was doing a small project for my American customers, just a mail server. Then Kirill Voloshin joined in, and the three of them did all this. Andrei brought Kirill Voloshin as a shift for himself. He said that he would launch the project and wash his hands on this. He had other plans for the future ...[Note A.A. - Andrei Kononovich, having changed several jobs in Belarus, is currently studying for an MBA program at the University of Michigan and will continue his career, possibly somewhere in Europe] .
Yu.Z. But Cyril came and stayed.
You originally wanted to make a portal?
Yu.Z. Of course, a portal. I even had no such question.
Who did you take as a sample?
Yu.Z. Yahoo . In my opinion, even in our very first interview, we said so: we want to make Belarusian Yahoo. At that time, Yahoo was the most developed resource, and all other Western resources that I saw with us were not applicable. At that moment, we simply would not have found an audience for them.
So, from the very beginning you planned to get the main profit from advertising?
Yu.Z. Yes, a complete copy of the Yahoo business model and its application to our realities.
Then you had only two types of paid services: advertising and hosting?
Yu.Z. Yes, advertising and hosting. As now, in fact. Nothing changed. At first, hosting and advertising went the same way, giving us equal shares of profit. But after a year, the advertisement pulled ahead, and now hosting gives us only fifteen percent.
Does hosting really give such a small share of the profit?
K.V. Well, what share of profit can he give if they pay $ 50 per year for hosting, and $ 150 per day for one simple news!
Yu.Z. Moreover, hosting is constantly cheaper, and advertising has risen in price.
But what about other services besides hosting and advertising? Consulting, website development?
Yu.Z. Consulting is generally a free service, and the development of sites is carried out by our partner - the company "Astronim" . We generally have many partners. Since we ourselves are not strong in everything, we conclude alliances. Our task is to ensure attendance, and let others do the rest.
And there have been many partners in the history of Tut.By?
K.V. In general, most of the portal resources were created not by us, but by our partners.
I know that you managed to shelter many content projects . Some then continued to develop independently. Thus, do you seem to fulfill the role of the organizational center of the Belarusian Internet, a kind of incubator?
Yu.Z. I once said that Tut.By is the center of Baynet's crystallization. To some extent, we are still managing this role.
Have you organized contests for the best projects and offered them free hosting?
Yu.Z. Yes, that was exactly the idea of the contest. New sections on the portal open constantly. In the future there will be a tourist section (maybe not this year) and a photo service for which we have already found a partner. We want to open blogs, we ourselves make them.
Do we have a blogging platform in Belarus? Vopnyarsky 's project “Blogs on Inf.By” .
Yu.Z. (asks Voloshin with a smile) Kira, what do you think, will we do it in a day for attendance or two?
And besides blogs, what else do you plan to open?
K.V. A global automotive project and a little entertaining. We will also connect Saytodrom to a free hosting so that you can quickly create sites. Auctions will be ...
That you have planned for sure. I wonder what do you want to discover in the long run?
Yu.Z. All! This is how the Americans say: one stop site so that we can find everything.
As for “find everything,” one of your partners, “Yandex,” is immediately remembered. Tell us how the collaboration with them began.
Yu.Z. We needed to implement a search. Writing your own search engine in the twenty-first century without resources is ridiculous. Therefore, we decided to choose some foreign search engine and get search results from them. Google was on Mail.Ru. We even wrote a letter to Google, but we did not receive a response, and obviously it would be expensive, especially since at that time Google search did not understand Russian word forms. Well, a search on Yandex was always better than a search on Rambler , so we turned to them. We agreed on a reef .
K.V. No, even before the RIF, we started using the “Regional Search”, which allowed us to get search results for any site sample in the Yandex design. Accordingly, we prepared a database on the basis of our catalog of Belarusian sites, merged this database with Yandex, and somewhere in the first six months, search in Belarus was carried out in this way, in the Yandex interface.
Then Yandex.XML already appeared, about which we agreed with them at the RIF. He allowed to make a search in our design and demanded payment. We regularly paid for it. But about a year ago, Yandex, driven by Runner and other competitors, entered the auto context market and began to expand its advertising space through some large sites, including us.
Yu.Z. That is, before we paid them, but now they pay us.
After all, you yourself also place contextual advertising in the search results?
Yu.Z. Only banner. We gave the text to our partners from Eniro.
Forgive me?
K.V. Eniro Belfacta. This is a company that makes reference books “Business Belarus” and “Contact”. Now they are selling our textual contextual advertising. And the media remained with us.
Yu.Z. We do what we are strong at, and retailing words does not apply here. As we have been tormented with this context ... Here comes some client to us to buy words on our search. Tanechka Alekseeva is sitting here (pointing in her direction) and processes it for two hours, explains what contextual advertising is. Well, then he orders advertisements for twenty dollars, and his banners of ten cents per click are unscrewed for six months, because we don’t have such terrible traffic as on Yandex [about Tut.By passes about 70,000 search queries per day - approx . A.A.] .
On the other hand, Eniro has fifteen sales managers, and they are very good sellers. As soon as we opened, they immediately came to us: two such cunning aunts appeared and they turned us into three hundred bucks for advertising. They then sold keywords on the Infoline 085 telephone inquiry service. If a person called the information desk and called the keyword "Internet services", then he was given our coordinates. Therefore, if they sell keywords in the directory and over the phone, then why don’t they sell on the Internet too?
It turns out that in Belarus, contextual advertising first appeared on the phone and only then on the Internet?
Yu.Z. (laughs)It turns out so. In general, contextual advertising for some reason did not go on the Belarusian Internet. I’ve gone all over the world, but we don’t. In general, our country is small, there are few business entities - well, what is there to look for? In Belarus, 80% of the economy is state-owned enterprises that are not advertised, and 70% of the economy is exported. Who needs advertising here? According to various sources, the entire advertising market is entirely $40-50 million per year. These are television, radio, newspapers and everything else taken together.
K.V. Plus, there is no popular payment system in the country that allows you to pay for a context order through an automatic sales system such as Direct without a visit to our office and a paper contract.
Yes, in one RuNet advertising twice as much. But back to your organizational structure. Are you trying to give any task to the side to simplify management?
Yu.Z. Therefore, in order not to lose initiative, not to wallow in trifles. We have a total of 18 people: four people in the technical department, two hosting managers ...
K.V. They are forum administrators, they manage moderators who work on forums voluntarily.
Yu.Z. He is also the chief editor, content project manager, marketing director, three online advertising sales managers, four-person bookkeeping, and the two of us. All. We fit in three small rooms.
Little…
Yu.Z. If we did everything ourselves, we would have a hundred people. A part of the Astronym is working for us. We have two hosting sites in Moscow and Minsk, for which we pay money for technical support. Most projects are with partners.
It is interesting, how long after its creation did the Tut.By portal reach the first place in terms of attendance on the Belarusian Internet?
K.V. Immediately, it came out in 2000. We also had to search this curve, which was through Yandex in their interface, a week later in terms of the number of queries ahead of the search engine of the respected Open Contact company . We overtook them quite quickly after a massive PR campaign in the media and distributing cakes with the inscription “Tut.By” at thePTS-2000 exhibition ... just a week after the opening.
Yu.Z. Hard to tell. I have our old statistics, but there are no "Open Contact" statistics. In general, we kept the first statistics on paper, because there was no statistical system, we made such empty tables, and Kira contributed every day how many hits, banner displays, and mailboxes were registered. All this has been preserved.
Are these leaves preserved?
Yu.Z. But what about! (He takes out a thick folder from the cabinet with several hundred filed documents and starts flipping) . Here is the first business plan - Kira did, here is the declaration of intent drawn up in March 2000, I already wrote this, but here are the statistics of visits.
Judging by the handwritten tables, on the first day of October 5, the site had a little more than a hundred hits, in two weeks - 52,000 a day, and in April 2001 daily traffic exceeded 1,200,000.
Yu.Z. And then the statistics have already gone electronically ... (Leafs through a folder) .
Do you watch this album often?
Yu.Z. No, I haven’t opened it for a couple of years. I just know where it lies ...
Yuri Zisser continues to leaf through the album, with a smile recalling the time when they were just starting a business on the Internet. Six years will soon come when they are trying to clearly follow Yahoo’s business model. In fact, Tut.By can already be recognized as a successful project. Probably, its owners have already earned their first million dollars, but they obviously do not want to stop there.
For all the time since the start of work on October 5, 2000, Tut.By did not attract absolutely any external investments. The only investor was Yuri Zisser. It was he who, six years ago, organized this project under the roof of his company "Reliable Programs", which since 1992 has been producing mainly banking software.
The project came to payback only at the end of 2002, and soon Tut.By began to bring so much money that Yuri in January 2005 sold his banking business to his competitors and devoted himself entirely to a new business. Thus, his company has now become a real Internet company, which plans to get about $ 500 thousand only from online advertising this year. Probably, its creator had conceived in the late 90's when he witnessed the “gold rush” in America with his own eyes dotcoms and saw purple taxis with the Yahoo logo driving around the streets of New York.
Now Yuri Zisser spends all days in an office in the very center of Minsk. The entrance to the building is from the side of the Catholic Church, near the monument to Lenin, under which the Belarusian builders, by order of the Old Man, dug a huge shopping complex in the manner of Manezhnaya Square. Yuri Zisser, along with his permanent assistant Kirill Voloshin (deputy director of Reliable Programs and general director of Tut.By), drinks tea and cake and recalls how they started this business.
There are legends that the idea of creating a portal came to Yuri during one of the many business trips to America?
Yuri Zisser: Actually, we have a section with the official history on our site. It clearly states that on March 8, 2000, I read the forum of the Computer News newspaper (KV) and there I saw one remark. Someone wrote that, they say, I have a super idea and I will give it to anyone who undertakes to realize it.
Kirill Voloshin: (laughs) And I knew another version of the creation of the portal ...
Yu.Z. Cyril, you would sometimes read your own site. In our section “History” this version is stated, and even there is a link to that forum “KV”, where that notorious message is published.
Then I wrote to the same forum and left my coordinates there for communication. Two days later, Sergey Dmitriev came to me [this is the author’s pseudonym of a famous Belarusian journalist and businessman - approx. AA] and said: let's open a free mail server.
Was this his posting on the forum?
Yu.Z. Yes him. But I thought: what the hell to create a mailer, he does not bring any money! In general, since the end of 1999 I began to pretend that it was necessary to "stir up" something on the Internet, but I did not know from which end to approach. I saw what was happening in America: there, in the late 90s, ten thousand dot-coms appeared simultaneously. The idea of a free email service did not inspire me at all. It was necessary to create something more serious. And Dmitriev brought one of his colleagues with him.
K.V. Another journalist.
Yu.Z. Yes, he brought Andrei Kononovich and said that on this his function is exhausted. He wanted to do only mail, and he considers the portal to be the wrong idea and will not take part in this, turned around and left, and we didn’t see him before the portal was launched. And Andrei Kononovich took up this matter as a project manager. The first-year student of BSUIR Danila Rudenko, whom he knew from birth, became our leading programmer. I knew about his talent, because even before that he was doing a small project for my American customers, just a mail server. Then Kirill Voloshin joined in, and the three of them did all this. Andrei brought Kirill Voloshin as a shift for himself. He said that he would launch the project and wash his hands on this. He had other plans for the future ...[Note A.A. - Andrei Kononovich, having changed several jobs in Belarus, is currently studying for an MBA program at the University of Michigan and will continue his career, possibly somewhere in Europe] .
Yu.Z. But Cyril came and stayed.
You originally wanted to make a portal?
Yu.Z. Of course, a portal. I even had no such question.
Who did you take as a sample?
Yu.Z. Yahoo . In my opinion, even in our very first interview, we said so: we want to make Belarusian Yahoo. At that time, Yahoo was the most developed resource, and all other Western resources that I saw with us were not applicable. At that moment, we simply would not have found an audience for them.
So, from the very beginning you planned to get the main profit from advertising?
Yu.Z. Yes, a complete copy of the Yahoo business model and its application to our realities.
Then you had only two types of paid services: advertising and hosting?
Yu.Z. Yes, advertising and hosting. As now, in fact. Nothing changed. At first, hosting and advertising went the same way, giving us equal shares of profit. But after a year, the advertisement pulled ahead, and now hosting gives us only fifteen percent.
Does hosting really give such a small share of the profit?
K.V. Well, what share of profit can he give if they pay $ 50 per year for hosting, and $ 150 per day for one simple news!
Yu.Z. Moreover, hosting is constantly cheaper, and advertising has risen in price.
But what about other services besides hosting and advertising? Consulting, website development?
Yu.Z. Consulting is generally a free service, and the development of sites is carried out by our partner - the company "Astronim" . We generally have many partners. Since we ourselves are not strong in everything, we conclude alliances. Our task is to ensure attendance, and let others do the rest.
And there have been many partners in the history of Tut.By?
K.V. In general, most of the portal resources were created not by us, but by our partners.
I know that you managed to shelter many content projects . Some then continued to develop independently. Thus, do you seem to fulfill the role of the organizational center of the Belarusian Internet, a kind of incubator?
Yu.Z. I once said that Tut.By is the center of Baynet's crystallization. To some extent, we are still managing this role.
Have you organized contests for the best projects and offered them free hosting?
Yu.Z. Yes, that was exactly the idea of the contest. New sections on the portal open constantly. In the future there will be a tourist section (maybe not this year) and a photo service for which we have already found a partner. We want to open blogs, we ourselves make them.
Do we have a blogging platform in Belarus? Vopnyarsky 's project “Blogs on Inf.By” .
Yu.Z. (asks Voloshin with a smile) Kira, what do you think, will we do it in a day for attendance or two?
And besides blogs, what else do you plan to open?
K.V. A global automotive project and a little entertaining. We will also connect Saytodrom to a free hosting so that you can quickly create sites. Auctions will be ...
That you have planned for sure. I wonder what do you want to discover in the long run?
Yu.Z. All! This is how the Americans say: one stop site so that we can find everything.
As for “find everything,” one of your partners, “Yandex,” is immediately remembered. Tell us how the collaboration with them began.
Yu.Z. We needed to implement a search. Writing your own search engine in the twenty-first century without resources is ridiculous. Therefore, we decided to choose some foreign search engine and get search results from them. Google was on Mail.Ru. We even wrote a letter to Google, but we did not receive a response, and obviously it would be expensive, especially since at that time Google search did not understand Russian word forms. Well, a search on Yandex was always better than a search on Rambler , so we turned to them. We agreed on a reef .
K.V. No, even before the RIF, we started using the “Regional Search”, which allowed us to get search results for any site sample in the Yandex design. Accordingly, we prepared a database on the basis of our catalog of Belarusian sites, merged this database with Yandex, and somewhere in the first six months, search in Belarus was carried out in this way, in the Yandex interface.
Then Yandex.XML already appeared, about which we agreed with them at the RIF. He allowed to make a search in our design and demanded payment. We regularly paid for it. But about a year ago, Yandex, driven by Runner and other competitors, entered the auto context market and began to expand its advertising space through some large sites, including us.
Yu.Z. That is, before we paid them, but now they pay us.
After all, you yourself also place contextual advertising in the search results?
Yu.Z. Only banner. We gave the text to our partners from Eniro.
Forgive me?
K.V. Eniro Belfacta. This is a company that makes reference books “Business Belarus” and “Contact”. Now they are selling our textual contextual advertising. And the media remained with us.
Yu.Z. We do what we are strong at, and retailing words does not apply here. As we have been tormented with this context ... Here comes some client to us to buy words on our search. Tanechka Alekseeva is sitting here (pointing in her direction) and processes it for two hours, explains what contextual advertising is. Well, then he orders advertisements for twenty dollars, and his banners of ten cents per click are unscrewed for six months, because we don’t have such terrible traffic as on Yandex [about Tut.By passes about 70,000 search queries per day - approx . A.A.] .
On the other hand, Eniro has fifteen sales managers, and they are very good sellers. As soon as we opened, they immediately came to us: two such cunning aunts appeared and they turned us into three hundred bucks for advertising. They then sold keywords on the Infoline 085 telephone inquiry service. If a person called the information desk and called the keyword "Internet services", then he was given our coordinates. Therefore, if they sell keywords in the directory and over the phone, then why don’t they sell on the Internet too?
It turns out that in Belarus, contextual advertising first appeared on the phone and only then on the Internet?
Yu.Z. (laughs)It turns out so. In general, contextual advertising for some reason did not go on the Belarusian Internet. I’ve gone all over the world, but we don’t. In general, our country is small, there are few business entities - well, what is there to look for? In Belarus, 80% of the economy is state-owned enterprises that are not advertised, and 70% of the economy is exported. Who needs advertising here? According to various sources, the entire advertising market is entirely $
K.V. Plus, there is no popular payment system in the country that allows you to pay for a context order through an automatic sales system such as Direct without a visit to our office and a paper contract.
Yes, in one RuNet advertising twice as much. But back to your organizational structure. Are you trying to give any task to the side to simplify management?
Yu.Z. Therefore, in order not to lose initiative, not to wallow in trifles. We have a total of 18 people: four people in the technical department, two hosting managers ...
K.V. They are forum administrators, they manage moderators who work on forums voluntarily.
Yu.Z. He is also the chief editor, content project manager, marketing director, three online advertising sales managers, four-person bookkeeping, and the two of us. All. We fit in three small rooms.
Little…
Yu.Z. If we did everything ourselves, we would have a hundred people. A part of the Astronym is working for us. We have two hosting sites in Moscow and Minsk, for which we pay money for technical support. Most projects are with partners.
It is interesting, how long after its creation did the Tut.By portal reach the first place in terms of attendance on the Belarusian Internet?
K.V. Immediately, it came out in 2000. We also had to search this curve, which was through Yandex in their interface, a week later in terms of the number of queries ahead of the search engine of the respected Open Contact company . We overtook them quite quickly after a massive PR campaign in the media and distributing cakes with the inscription “Tut.By” at the
Yu.Z. Hard to tell. I have our old statistics, but there are no "Open Contact" statistics. In general, we kept the first statistics on paper, because there was no statistical system, we made such empty tables, and Kira contributed every day how many hits, banner displays, and mailboxes were registered. All this has been preserved.
Are these leaves preserved?
Yu.Z. But what about! (He takes out a thick folder from the cabinet with several hundred filed documents and starts flipping) . Here is the first business plan - Kira did, here is the declaration of intent drawn up in March 2000, I already wrote this, but here are the statistics of visits.
Judging by the handwritten tables, on the first day of October 5, the site had a little more than a hundred hits, in two weeks - 52,000 a day, and in April 2001 daily traffic exceeded 1,200,000.
Yu.Z. And then the statistics have already gone electronically ... (Leafs through a folder) .
Do you watch this album often?
Yu.Z. No, I haven’t opened it for a couple of years. I just know where it lies ...
Yuri Zisser continues to leaf through the album, with a smile recalling the time when they were just starting a business on the Internet. Six years will soon come when they are trying to clearly follow Yahoo’s business model. In fact, Tut.By can already be recognized as a successful project. Probably, its owners have already earned their first million dollars, but they obviously do not want to stop there.