Mail.Ru Group revises monetization processes

Anton Fedchin, the general director of Odnoklassnikov, told Vedomosti that last year the social network paid 4 billion rubles to application developers, and most of the money (about 90%) went to game developers. In 2013, the total amount was one third less. According to Fedchin, the revenue from all applications is distributed exactly between 50 and 50 between the company and the developers. Judging by this amount, the network could have helped more if the distribution of income were somewhat different. It is not surprising that this is not the only source of income, and the social network earns advertising, the proceeds of which are not disclosed.

In total over the past year, more than five hundred new online games have been released on the social network, and as always, casual games are ahead of the rest of the planet . The company, on the basis of mass considerations, is not in vain putting games of such a plan in the first place, explaining their wide distribution by the simplicity of mechanics and availability.

Today, Odnoklassniki is wholly owned by Mail.ru Group, whose revenue last year amounted to a considerable amount of 35.77 billion rubles. On user payments, in the reporting segment of which payments for applications fall, the company earned 11.87 billion rubles. That is, Odnoklassniki brought about 33% to the total Mail.ru Group piggy bank.

At the same time, Mail.Ru Group continues to lose revenue from display advertising, but it keeps revenue growth precisely due to games and user payments for social services.

The total revenue of Mail.Ru Group in 2014 increased by 14.8%, to 35.77 billion rubles., EBITDA - by 13.5%, to 18.3 billion rubles., Net profit - by 11.4%, to 12.5 billion rubles. The company's business growth slowed down. For comparison: in 2013, its revenue grew by 22%, and a year earlier the growth was 39%.

According to Dmitry Grishin, in the fourth quarter of last year, revenues from display advertising, as in the previous two, continued to decline under the influence of the economic and geopolitical situation, and this year the company is going to focus on the development of mobile and video advertising.

In anticipation of future revenue from mobile advertising, the concern will release a special platform - myTarget, on which advertisers will be able to buy mobile traffic in all the applications of the group themselves (previously they had to buy advertising on each separately).

Analysts now include the group in the top companies publishing mobile applications in terms of downloads and profitability. In this top companies with the largest number of downloads in Russia, Mail.ru Group, according to data for January 2015, took second place with its portfolio of 142 applications, as a result of which the company gave way to the only game producer of the British company Outfit7, which has 58 applications . Both Facebook (5th place, 44 applications, including WhatsApp and Instagram), and Google (10th place, 191 applications) remained behind.

Mail.ru Group has only sixth place in the revenue ranking in our country. The top three gaming companies are Supercell, Machine Zone and Wargaming.net.