14 DAY TRIAL // The largest social network in Russia, Vkontakte, is about to go international, adding support for 12 new languages soon. The social network, backed by the same Russian investment firm that bought a $200-million stake in Facebook earlier this year, has acquired the vk.com domain name for an undisclosed sum believed to be lower than $100,000, planning to branch out into non-Russian-speaking regions as early as next month.
According to Russian newspaper Vedomosti, via TechCrunch, the social network that bears more than a striking resemblance to Facebook, acquired the domain name in late August with the clear intention of becoming an international brand, joining a very crowded market handily dominated by Facebook.
The interesting part is that Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies owns Vkontakte, but has also acquired a 1.96-percent stake in Facebook in heavily publicized investment, valuating the giant social network at $10 billion. It then offered to buy an additional $100 million worth of common stock at a $6.5-billion valuation from Facebook employees and early investors and apparently got taken up on the offer very fast.
This, of course, raises a dilemma, as the two social networks are about to go head-to-head in 12 new markets besides the Russian one, where Facebook is just the seventh most popular social network with a rather large gap between it and the leading services. When interviewed earlier this year, Yuri Milner, CEO and Founder of DST, believed that social networks could coexist and that users could have multiple accounts across a number of services. He, of course, isn't new to this kind of 'competition,' as the third largest social network in Russia, My World by Mail.ru, is also owned by DST.
Vkontakte claims to have 42 million registered users and sees a little over 14 million unique monthly visitors. Russians are actually the most active users of social networks and 59 percent of the Internet population, 18.9 million users, have an account on at least one such service.