The Rambler search portal is one of the most popular Internet sites in Russia, and has long battled with local competitor Yandex and global giant Google for users.

The company posted a 150%1H 2008 revenue increase year-on-year – something Chief Product Officer Arkady Moreynis attributes to a development-minded management team.

Business Today asked what the company is doing to distinguish itself from its competitors.

“The overall business strategy of Rambler is to become the entry point to the Internet.  We have been the portal for all this time and now we are just continuing to focus on the same idea but we are trying to make it our main goal and main proposition to our customers.”

RT: What would you say are the most interesting trends in the Russian Internet today?

“Demand for so-called social networking serviceslike the sites odnoklassniki, vkontakte.  Their surprising growth over the last year is an interesting trend. We think the success of the social networking sphere is country-specific.” 

RT: How much room for growth is there in the social networking sphere?

“Theoretically, it's the number of Russian citizens who have access to the Internet.”

RT: The sale of the contextual ad company Begun made news last month.  What was the reason for the sale?

“The efficiency of the context ad system – by efficiency I mean revenue – it comes from two things.  The first is traffic – the overall traffic of the system.  And the second thing – when more clients are coming to the system, the auction is growing – the bid prices are growing and so the revenue is growing. We think putting together the traffic of Rambler and Google will allow to increase the overall traffic of this ad system and thus increase the big prices.  So even on our end there will be more traffic.  Our goal was to create the synergy and to use the results of this synergy.”