Yandex Partners with Rambler

Internet, June 23, 2011. Yandex (NASDAQ: YNDX) and Rambler have announced a partnership for search and advertising services. Starting today, Rambler’s search services will be powered by Yandex’s search engine and Rambler will join Yandex’s Ad Network.

Rambler is one of the biggest and most well-known web resources in Russia. Rambler’s joining the Yandex Ad Network will give advertisers on Yandex.Direct an opportunity to broaden their target audience and attract new customers, benefiting, among other factors, from quality search traffic.

Currently, the Yandex Ad Network counts thousands of websites including popular Odnoklassniki, Mail.ru and Bing.com. Websites joining the Yandex Ad Network are offered an integrated solution that combines Yandex’s search engine for their pages and advertising opportunities provided by Yandex.Direct. Currently, websites using Yandex’s search technology include Livejournal.ru, Nigma.ru and Qip.ru.

“The efficiency of contextual advertising is what makes it the most popular promotional tool on the internet market”, says Alexei Tretyakov, Chief Commercial Officer at Yandex. “We can see advertisers’ interest in the Yandex Ad Network and we always look to add new members including search engines and content websites. Thanks to our partnership with Rambler, the advertisers on Yandex.Direct will now have even more quality search traffic.”

Ads placed via Yandex.Direct can now run in Rambler’s search results, as well as on its content pages. In addition to the Yandex.Direct ads, Rambler continues to show ads placed via Begun, a contextual advertising platform, in which Rambler has controlling interest. The two systems share advertising space on search results pages under agreement. To give Begun’s advertising clients an opportunity to run their ads in any placement position on Rambler, the system can place their ads via Yandex.Direct. Also, these ads can run on Yandex’s search results pages and on the pages of websites in the Yandex Ad Network.

Rambler is a search system and a web portal that has been in operation since 1996. Currently, its search audience totals to 4.2 million, 14% of the Russian internet audience. The audience of the consolidated Rambler and Afisha’s projects exceeds 17 million (according to TNS, May 2011).

Yandex is the leading internet company in Russia, operating the country’s most popular search engine and the most visited website. According to LiveInternet, in May 2011 we generated 64.8% of all search traffic in Russia. Our yandex.ru website attracted a monthly audience of over 40 million unique visitors (according to comScore, May 2011). We also operate in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. Our mission is to answer any question internet users may have.

Yandex.Direct is the first and largest automated, auction-based ad-serving system for contextual advertising on the Russian internet. Ads purchased on a cost-per-click basis are displayed for millions of users on search results pages and on websites in the Yandex Ad Network.

Contact:
Media Relations
Vladimir Isaev, Ochir Mandzhikov
Phone: +7 495 739-7000
E-mail: pr@yandex-team.com