It looks like even Russia isn’t immune to the downturn. Rambler Media, the Russian company that runs the massive Rambler portal has reported a large drop in display and contextual advertising revenues in six months ended June 30 which it puts down to a decline in ad spending and the depreciation of the Russian Ruble against the US Dollar. This, despite number of visitors rising to over 50 million per month. However, Rambler’s search market share has falling to less that 10% while Yandex, Mail.ru and Google all gained market share.
Curiously they have a new startegy though. Olga Turischeva, who started as Rambler CEO in April 2009, has plans for “reallocating more effort to such services as communications and navigation” but also her “long term vision is to transform Rambler into an incubator of ideas and start ups.” Sounds interesting.
The other financial highlights are total revenues of $30.8 million in the first half of the year (H1) 2009, down 40% from $51.7 million in H1 2008. Revenue from contextual ads is on $12.7 million, down 45% from $23.2 million. Revenue from display/banner ads is on $13.1 million, down 36% from $20.5 million. Revenue from paid listings is on $1.8 million, down 38% from $2.9 million. It had an EBITDA of $2.6 million in H1 2009, down from $8.9 million in H1 2008. Rambler Media’s shares are traded on Alternative Investment Market (AIM) of the London Stock Exchange.
The site is getting 51.5 million average monthly unique users in H1 2009, up 38% from 37.3 million in H1 2008. There were 3.1 billion average monthly page-views in H1 2009, up 10% from H1 2008.
(via Quintura)