The emergence of the social network VKontakte, like other successful projects, began with an interesting idea, which the founders managed to translate into reality. While some of them lost their popularity over time or even failed, VK still occupies a leading position today.
According to SimilarWeb statistics, as of January 2021, the social media site vk.com is the second most popular among users in Russia. Who do you think is in the lead? Of course, yandex.ru. Although in the Alexa ranking the top places look a little different: vk.com ranks third - youtube.com and yandex.ru turned out to be more popular among Runet users.
How did a meeting between two classmates grow into a successful IT project?
Everyone knows that the main creator of VKontakte is Pavel Durov, a bright personality and a talented programmer. Even during his student years, he actively developed, for example, he created the forum of St. Petersburg State University.
By chance, his classmate Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, with whom they lost contact 7 years ago, found out about this. While studying at an American university, Vyacheslav noticed how quickly social networks were popularizing. With this idea, he “came” to Durov, sending a fateful letter to his email. Soon they were discussing the promising idea of finding classmates and fellow students via the Internet.
By the time VKontakte was developed, Durov had almost everything - knowledge and experience in programming, an understanding of the target audience and a base of loyal student forum participants, but no money. This issue was resolved by Mirilashvili.
Youth and students
In 2001, the future creator of everyone’s favorite social network graduated from the educational institution with excellent marks and entered the St. Petersburg State University.
This time can be considered golden for the development of his abilities. He excels in his studies, participates in various competitions and receives various awards (including from the government and the president).
At the university, Pasha’s other qualities also emerged: in addition to his studies, he managed to organize various events and eventually became one of the best students at St. Petersburg State University with the highest level of intelligence and leadership abilities.
While studying at the university, Pasha managed to create 2 small non-profit projects:
- Website for students durov.com.
It was a platform for the exchange of opinions and a place where one could read abstracts.
The website for St. Petersburg State University students became Pavel’s first major development
- Forum Spbgu.ru.
Here students argued, expressed their opinions about their studies, and shared their thoughts. It often happened that in order to create activity on the forum, Durov created “leftist” accounts and argued with himself.
Pavel graduated from the university in 2006, receiving the highest scores in all subjects.
An interesting biographical fact: the education document remained at the university; the future creator of VK did not take it.
Birthday of social media VKontakte
The website vkontakte.ru was registered on October 1, 2006, but it is believed that the launch date of the social network coincides with the birthday of its creator - October 10 of the same year, when VKontakte acquired its first functionality.
Have you already guessed where the first users of the social network came from? Of course, from the university forum, in which Durov continued to remain an administrator. At first, students registered by invitation, indicating their real name and surname. After about a month, free registration appeared, and the number of users gradually increased.
Pavel Durov – creator of VKontakte
Criticism of Durov
Many are grateful to the creator of a safe and super secure messenger. But there are also those who are ready to criticize. Let us recall several controversial moments in Paul’s biography.
1) Many people still did not understand the act of the creator of VK and Telegram, which he and his top managers performed on the city’s birthday in 2012. Then Durov launched paper airplanes with five thousand dollar bills attached to them out the window.
Photos from the scene
Soon a crowd gathered under the windows, and things even came to a fight. As Pavel later admitted, he did this to create a festive mood for people. About two thousand dollars were thrown out the window.
This event was immediately followed by a reaction from bloggers and media personalities. Many did not understand what Paul's true goal was and perceived his act as a mockery of people.
2) The second controversial act was committed by the founder of VK also in 2012, on May 9. Pavel published a tweet in which he said that on this significant day, “Stalin defended Hitler’s right to repress the population.”
A wave of negativity and criticism arose again. And Nikolai Valuev even announced the closure of his VKontakte account as a sign of protest. Later, the VK press secretary explained Pavel’s words by saying that Durov’s grandfather was undeservedly repressed, having honestly gone through the entire war.
3) In 2013, a new scandalous event occurred. The creator of a popular social network violated traffic rules and hit a traffic police officer who intended to stop him.
Operational footage
As a result, the policeman received abrasions and bruises, and a criminal case was opened against the creator of VK under Article 318. A little later, however, it was closed due to insufficient evidence to prove intentional harm.
Foundation of VKontakte LLC and first successes
VKontakte LLC was founded at the beginning of 2007. As expected, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili became the owner of 60% of the shares. The rest were divided between Pavel Durov - 20%, Mikhail Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev - 10% each. Pavel’s brother, Nikolai Durov, becomes the technical director.
In its first years of development, VKontakte immediately competed with the then popular social media Odnoklassniki, and in 2008 it confidently overtook it, taking the position of the most popular resource on the Runet (according to Alexa). Meanwhile, new functionality appears on VKontakte - the ability to leave anonymous opinions, draw graffiti on users’ walls, audio and video recordings, and applications.
Biography of Pavel Durov: childhood
The future billionaire and founder of the social network was born in the Soviet Union in 1984.
Pasha in childhood
His father was a doctor of philology, and his mother was studying to be a journalist at that time.
Pasha's older brother, Nikolai, loved mathematics from early childhood, and subsequently helped a lot in the development and support of Vkontakte and Telegram.
Older brother - Nikolai Durov
Pasha started first grade in Italy. The family moved to Turin because of his father's work project.
Father - Valery Semyonovich Durov
By the way, in addition to Italian, Pavel also speaks English, German, French, Spanish and one of the dead languages - Latin.
After 2 years, the Durovs returned to the USSR, and Pasha attended a regular secondary school for several years.
In 1996 he entered the Academic Gymnasium at the State University in St. Petersburg.
There Pasha began to study several foreign languages in depth and became interested in programming.
His classmates considered him a silent, unsociable boy who always kept to himself.
An interesting biographical fact: Pasha was once punished for his trick with school computers. Durov changed the screensaver on all PCs to a photograph of a school teacher with an unflattering inscription.
As a result, the boy was deprived of access to computers, but he still managed to crack passwords.
Transition to business monetization
The project required significant investments in the development and purchase of new servers, so commercial functions appeared on VKontakte: increasing the rating using paid SMS, as well as the “Gifts” application with the purchase of pictures that can be sent to other users.
But this was not enough. Contrary to its initial position, in the summer of 2008 the company entered into a contract under which advertising banners would appear on social media. The audience size exceeds 20 million users, and at the end of 2008, the company's net profit is $4.5 million.
VKontakte plans to popularize abroad
In 2009, Lev Leviev (executive director) plans to develop abroad, so social media buys the domain name vk.com. According to management plans, the vk.com website should be launched in 12 languages in the fall of 2009.
In the same year, the social network opened an API for developers. As a result, the company receives a new format of income. For example, the developers managed to get $20 million from the game “Happy Farmer,” with half of the amount going into the pocket of the social network. At the end of 2009, VKontakte's net profit amounted to $11.6 million.
In contact with
The idea of this social network was born to Pasha while he was studying at the university. There, Durov realized that the forum for student communication was not entirely effective and did not cope with its task.
Many site users remained anonymous and used nicknames to communicate. It turned out that two classmates might not even realize that they were arguing with each other on the forum.
At this time, Pasha’s friend, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, came from abroad and talked about the American social network Facebook, which the students used.
Pavel found this idea interesting: users of this project indicated real names when registering and published photographs. Immediately after graduating from university, Pavel began to implement his idea. The resulting project bore the discreet but targeted name “Student.ru”, and was later renamed “Vkontakte”.
VKontakte logo
In the fall of 2006, a domain of the same name was registered and the site went live. At first, it was possible to get on the social network only by invitation, but later Durov abandoned this, and anyone could register.
VKontakte began to develop by leaps and bounds. By 2007, the number of users on the network exceeded 20 million. In the same year, the founder of VK becomes the best young entrepreneur.
Pavel began to receive offers to sell VK, but he rejected them. Instead, the businessman decided to attract investment in the project.
The first deal took place with the chairman of Digital Sky Technologies. After some time, he resold his shares to Mail.ru Group.
In 2008, the site was monetized, after which Pavel was able to afford to rent an office in the Singer house on Nevsky Prospekt.
The same Singer house
Durov himself lived in a rented apartment next to the office, in which any employee could stay overnight if necessary.
Colleagues said that Pavel did not show up at work until lunch, but he always worked until late.
VKontakte audience 70 million users
VKontakte receives the status of the largest social network on the Russian Internet. According to TNS statistics, in the summer of 2010, the monthly number of users of the social network was 19.6 million. By the fall of the same year, the number of registered users already exceeded 70 million.
The social network provides free access to the mobile portal 0.vkontakte.ru, the purpose of which is to quickly load web pages via the mobile Internet. In essence, it was a lightweight website format for mobile phones - m.vkontakte.ru.
By this time, 32.55% of VKontakte belonged to Mail.Ru Group, which provided a report for 2010. It again showed significant growth: VKontakte’s revenue amounted to $93.8 million, and EBIDTA was $28.4 million.
Confrontation between Mail.Ru Group and Durov
In the summer of 2011, Mail.Ru Group increases its share in social media by another 7.44%, reaching 39.99%. It is clear that the holding needed complete control over the social network - VKontakte was a competitor, “taking away” the audience from Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir, owned by Mail.Ru Group. The company's leaders themselves stated this.
The eccentric Pavel Durov did not stand aside, commenting on these statements on his Instagram account - in the photo he depicted a “figure with a middle finger” and explained that Mail.Ru Group may not count on the takeover of VKontakte. But he was still wrong about this.
Scandals around VKontakte and unprofitable years
In 2011, the FSB asked to close political opposition groups registered on VKontakte. But Durov’s team ignores pressure from the intelligence services, explaining that the social network is an apolitical project that does not express support for any of the parties.
Then the work of the project was significantly affected by anti-piracy laws - the administration had to carry out the so-called cleansing of content on social media. Further, the United States accuses the domestic social network of providing access to intellectual property without obtaining permission from the copyright holder. In general, there were quite a lot of similar cases.
The Mail.Ru Group holding reports that from 2008 to 2011. VKontakte was a profitable project, but in 2012 the project suffered a net loss of 210 million rubles, and in 2013 – 137 million rubles.
Telegram
In 2011, Durov begins work on creating a messenger.
They say that the idea of secure correspondence occurred to him at the moment when special forces soldiers were standing at his door. They came to search his apartment when a wave of protests against the government swept across Russia. In 2013, Telegram became available for download in the AppStore. This messenger is gradually becoming more and more popular not only in the world, but also in Russia. According to preliminary data, in 2021 there are already about 200 million users.
Despite its universal popularity, Telegram also cannot boast of a simple fate. The government drew attention to the messenger back in 2015, and since then has been trying in every possible way to prevent its distribution and operation.
The official version of the State Duma’s dislike for the messenger is that the application is allegedly used by terrorists. However, the developers and team did not previously refuse to block groups and chats related to the Islamic State group banned in the Russian Federation.
The only thing Durov does not want to do is provide data on user correspondence to third parties. And this only benefits us.
“Threats to block Telegram if it does not agree to give up the personal data of its users will not bear any fruit. Telegram will support freedom and privacy"
In 2021, Russia adopted the Yarovaya Law, which obliges instant messengers to hand over keys to decrypt user correspondence to intelligence agencies. Telegram did not transmit any data, so in 2021 he was fined 800 thousand rubles.
In 2021, the story of Durov’s confrontation with the Russian special services received a new development. Roskomnadzor warned the owner of the messenger that if he does not hand over the encryption keys, the messenger will be blocked in Russia.
Pasha again refused, and as a result, on April 16, Internet providers stopped providing access to the application. But a solution was found. Telegram developers began to introduce built-in proxies, and users learned about VPN.
On April 22, an action of opposition to Roskomnadzor took place: everyone who disagreed with the blocking decision launched paper airplanes from the windows. And on April 30, a rally in defense of the free Internet was held in Moscow, which was attended by more than 12 thousand people.
Telegram support campaign
The platform is currently being actively debugged, which should ultimately become a powerful tool with a built-in payment system and various cloud services.
How did Mail.Ru Group buy out 100% of VKontakte shares in 2014?
In April 2014, information appeared that 48% of VKontakte shares were purchased by the United Capital Partners fund - these were the shares of Vyacheslav and Mikhail Mirilashvili, as well as executive director Lev Leviev.
How and why? The motives of the co-founders, as well as the amount of the transaction, were not subject to disclosure. Thus, United Capital Partners becomes the largest shareholder of the social network. At the same time, 40% remains with Mail.Ru Group, and 12% with Durov. Meanwhile, VKontakte is setting new records.
On January 20, 2014, the number of social network users per day reached a record 60.2 million people. (LiveInternet statistics). Net profit in 2014 amounted to 709 million rubles, which is 15 times higher than the previous year.
Photo from Durov’s personal VKontakte page (January 21, 2014)
In January, Durov sells his share of VKontakte to Ivan Tavrin, who served as CEO at Megafon. And here you can track interesting facts.
As it turned out, the main owner of Megafon was Alisher Usmanov, who was also the controlling shareholder of Mail.ru Group. That is, Tavrin and Usmanov were actually partners. As a result, Usmanov, albeit indirectly, gained control over the VKontakte project, since the total share of Mail.ru Group and Tavrin amounted to 52% of the shares. By the way, the latter sold his 12% stake in Mail.ru Group in March.
In September, the holding announced that it was buying out the remaining 48% and receiving a 100% share of VKontakte. This is how Pavel Durov loses his “fight” to Mail.ru Group, to whom we can give credit. To completely absorb a seemingly unattainable project in about six months is not an easy task.
Who owns the social network VKontakte
“Growing pains” of the network that beats the social networks of Zuckerberg and Brin
Today a malfunction was recorded in the VKontakte social network. The photo application Snapster, released by VKontakte developers two weeks ago, also did not work. It was previously reported that VKontakte is trying to limit users from switching to the Instagram photo service. Now, for some users, links to Instagram photos in posts and personal messages are published as inactive.
Meanwhile, in general, Russian social networks beat Zuckerberg’s
and
Brina
. Last year, the VKontakte audience grew by 19% and exceeded 66 million, while the number of Odnoklassniki users amounted to 45.6 million people, which is 9% more than in 2013. Vkontakte also increased the share of mobile users - from 57% in 2013 to 71% last year.
The network affiliation is interesting. Previously, we recorded that Yandex belongs to a group of Jews, led by the Oppenheimers and Rothschilds
and "Russian Jews".
WHO OWNS VKONTAKTE?
VKontakte LLC was created on January 19, 2007. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the founders were the son and father Vyacheslav
and
Mikhail Mirilashvili
(60% and 10% of the authorized capital, respectively),
Lev Leviev
(10%) and
Pavel Durov
(20%).
Reference.
The first profile registered in the Vkontakte.ru system was Durov, the third was his former classmate Vyacheslav (Itzhak) Mirilashvili, who then moved to Israel due to threats and graduated from Tufts University, USA in 2006.
Lev Leviev
was born in Volgograd in 1984, studied at the same school as Mirilashvili in Tel Aviv.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Mirilashvili (Misha Kutaissky)
- born in 1960 in Georgia.
He has lived in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) since 1978. A pediatrician by training. Married, two children. Religion: Judaism. This “authoritative entrepreneur” ran the gambling business in Moscow and St. Petersburg, was the president of the Russian Video company, sponsored the elections of Starovoytova , and replaced the president of the Russian Jewish Society,
Vladimir Gusinsky
(Mirilashvili has dual citizenship of Russia and Israel). Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Petromir holding (pharmaceuticals, chemistry, medicine, furniture production, construction, real estate, new technologies, restaurant and hotel business); President of CONTI Corporation (entertainment, gambling and club business); co-owner of the St. Petersburg Open tennis tournament (ATP-Tour series, the largest in the world). He was a member of the management of LUKoil-North-West Oil Products.
In 2001, Mirilashvili was accused of kidnapping two people who kidnapped his father. The murder charge was later dropped, and the prison term was reduced from 12 to 8 years. In his first interview given after his release, he stated that he had become “even more Jewish than before.”
In 2013, together with M. Freeman, G. Khan
and other Jewish oligarchs went on a journey along the “road of Moses.”
Member of the board of the Russian Jewish Congress .
FINANCIAL INDICATORS
According to Albert Popkov
, co-owner of the website Odnoklassniki.ru, expenses for such projects amount to millions of dollars a year, investments will be recouped through advertising. And Vkontakte.ru makes money with the help of a subsidiary recruitment agency.
Mikhail Ravdonikas
, public relations coordinator for Vkontakte.ru then said that the agency’s income doubled monthly and reached $50,000 per month. Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki became a phenomenon in 2007. According to the TNS Web Index report, in January 2007 the Moscow daily audience of Yandex was 2.097 million visitors, Mail.ru 2.06 million, Odnoklassniki 1.653 million and Rambler 1.032 million. Gallup does not estimate the audience of Vkontakte.ru .
Leviev and Mirilashvili separately enriched themselves by creating the Selectel company in 2007 and opening a data center to meet VKontakte’s needs for data processing and storage. The social network completely switched to it by 2009 and, until the launch of its own data center in 2012, depended on a single service provider. This allowed Selectel to become a large company with 11% of the data center market by number of server racks by the end of 2011.
In 2010, Leviev and Vyacheslav Mirilashvili created the Vaizra Capital venture fund with representative offices in New York, Israel and St. Petersburg to invest in technology companies at any stage of development, investing in a number of other people’s projects: video hosting Coub, hotel booking service Ostrovok.ru, publishing house "Committee" (including the publication about the IT industry "Zuckerberg Will Call", social media TJournal and startup community Spark), online consultant for Livetex sites, community for extreme sports enthusiasts Riders. At the end of 2014, the general fund portfolio included about 30 projects. In August 2014, Leviev announced a personal investment of € 500 thousand in a joint venture with Boaz Behar
startup - API platform for Bitcoin developers BlockTrail.
Leviev and Mirilashvili are investors in Yuri Milner's
DST Global II and DST Global IV
As for the social network itself, today VKontakte is the largest Russian social network, whose monthly audience, according to TNS estimates, is 31.5 million people. The company's revenue in 2012 amounted to 4.8 billion rubles.
TRANSFERS OF OWNERSHIP
As of February 1, 2008, 100% of Vkontakte was transferred to the offshore Doraview Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands.
The first external investor was the Digital Sky Technologies
Yu. Milner
(son of
Boris/Benzion Milner
, who ruined the world's first computer network developed in the USSR by the wonderful Russian academician
Viktor Mikhailovich Glushkov
), which bought a quarter of the social network in 2007 and later transferred it to the balance sheet of Mail.Ru Group. Gradually, Mail.ru Group began to buy back shares of the VKontakte network. By purchasing another 7.5% of shares. So both Mirilashvili sold Mail.ru - 30%, Leviev - 4%, and Durov - 8% of the company's shares.
In 2011, Mail.ru Group increased its share in the VKontakte social network from 32.49% to 39.99%. The company exercised an option to buy out 7.44% from the founders of the network at a price of $111.7 million. By the end of the year, Mail.ru Group already owned 39.99% of the social network, and the remaining 60% was divided between Durov (12%), Leviev (8 %) and the Mirilashvili family (40%). The transaction was carried out through JPMorgan, which describes the shareholder structure.
In April 2013, Mirilashvili’s share was purchased by the United Capital Partners fund, which is headed by Ilya Sherbovich
, a member of the boards of directors of such large companies as Transneft and Federal Grid Company. Forbes devoted a special article to how he circumvented legal restrictions and sold Gazprom shares to foreign companies. At the same time, it is shown that Shcherbovich is a long-time partner of the Russian government, while engaging in raiding and money laundering through offshore companies.
On January 25, 2014, Durov announced that he sold all his remaining shares (12%) to his friend Ivan Tavrin
, director of Megafon.
In September 2014, it sold the remaining 48.01% stake in the social network Mail.ru Group for $1.47 billion.
Thus, Mail.ru Group became the owner of 100% of the shares of the VKontakte social network, since both Megafon and Mail.ru, in turn, belong to the oligarch Alisher Usmanov
, an Uzbek, convicted in 1980 of extortion and rape.
Usmanov’s wife, born into a family of Samarkand Jews, Irina Viner-Usmanova
, who was in charge of the Russian gymnastics team, brought
V. Putin
together with
A. Kabaeva
. After which Usmanov actively began buying up all media resources of any importance. It got to the point that even Habrahabr was under his control for some time.
Today, VKontakte is the largest Russian social network, whose monthly audience, according to TNS estimates, is 31.5 million people. The company's revenue in 2012 amounted to 4.8 billion rubles.
It should be noted that, oddly enough, VKontakte - especially in comparison with Facebook - still gives relative freedom to its users - and does not block users for harsh criticism of the regime, the Jewish coup in the former Ukraine, the Kremlin’s betrayal of Donbass, etc. .
Apparently we haven't gotten there yet.
How does VKontakte live under the leadership of Mail.ru Group?
Now the company is more loyal to cooperation with intelligence agencies. Thus, in the summer of 2021, a social media spokesman confirmed the information that VKontakte transferred data about its users to law enforcement agencies. Do you think through the court? Surprisingly, this happened simply at the request of the intelligence service. This statement was made by Evgeny Krasnikov at a forum in Kazan.
In 2021, agreements were signed between the social network and major copyright holders of music products, including such as Universal Music, Believe Digital, Sony Music. But this did not change the US attitude towards the Russian social network.
In 2021, VKontakte is once again listed on the updated list of the US Department of Commerce, which consists of the 25 largest pirate sites. I don’t think it’s even worth talking about Ukrainian sanctions in 2021 - everyone knows that.
Official results of Mail.Ru Group for 2021: VKontakte’s revenue increased significantly and amounted to 18 billion rubles. Monthly audience of 97 million users.
As before, the social network is constantly acquiring new features: secure video and voice calls in applications for mobile devices, algorithms (protection of unique content), live covers, archiving of recordings and others.
The social network strives to penetrate more into the lives of its users. For example, the VK Hackathon project organizes large-scale competitions for developers with prize funds. VK Cup holds annual championships among programmers, VK Fest organizes open-air festivals.
Official announcement of the 5th VK Hackathon (2019)
