How to successfully accustom visitors to a new type of resources - urban portals
Creating a profitable city portal in Moscow is not only successfully transferring the regional experience, but first of all - to change the view of visitors, to accustom to the previously unaccustomed format “website in Moscow”. Mikhail Denisov and Mikhail Iosilevich - the leaders of the portal moskva.com, talk about their way to overcome these difficulties. About helping their principles and related discoveries. And if you believe their words, the past break-even breakout is only the beginning :)
NN.RU
Mikhail Denisov begins and continues the conversation, and where the respondent is not marked, the answers are his.
- It all began with the Nizhny Novgorod portal nn.ru. It was back in the 99m year, with the birth, one might say, of the regional Internet. The portal was laid a lot of functionality, different information (as in any urban site), and only one forum. But the thing that concerns communication, shot the most. Now on the resource more than 1000 forums.
And in general, Nizhny Novgorod go to the portal more often than Yandex.
- How did it happen that the local portal beat all-Russian in popularity?
- In general, for the regions it is quite a typical situation. There are portals e1 (Ekaterinburg), ngs (Novosibirsk). In Moscow, this is not the case, because there is a lot of competition from the thematic resources.
- Why, what is it connected with? Do they have other surfing patterns?
- Rather, another idea about the Internet. The mentality is different. There is a city - and its portal, a kind of Internet access point, where they keep their mail, use a portal search.
So it happened - maybe this is a Russian peculiarity like this ... Or regional identity typical for the province. After all, their government, television, radio, clubs, culture, and their Internet are there. Therefore, the regional portal has its popularity. This Muscovites are accustomed to, that the entire Runet - urban site.
- How and due to what gained popularity nn.ru?
- Nn.ru gained popularity because it was thoroughly worked on :) nn.ru grew along with runet, in the urban space of Nizhny Novgorod. In fact, it was a product of the new time, which reflected everything new that appeared on the Internet, and vice versa, often what appeared on nn.ru for the first time - then spread as a practice on other sites of Runet.
So, the idea worked, and we decided to make a website for Moscow. This was in 2005, and in Moscow there were really no such portals (before Mikhail had already said why; and then he would note that there are no real competitors now, PN) There were only some private initiatives.
About a year later, we were finalizing the engine - mainly for communication, especially since Web 2.0 appeared just then. As a result, in terms of communication, he was very strong. Aiming at the end user - he has his own third-level domain, a blog, photohosting without restrictions, video hosting ... And at the end of 2006, in November, they released the project.
- And how much did the development cost as a result?
- Oh, a lot ... Of course, most of them went to programmers salaries. They sit in Nizhny Novgorod, and there are rather big wages, by Russian standards, although, of course, they are not Moscow.
Moskva.com. Visitors
- Due to what managed to attract the first visitors?
- We had several projects in stock, for example, ostrie.ru (a resource with anecdotes told by the users themselves), which we smoothly built into moskva.com. This allowed the first stage to get the first 10 thousand visitors.
This is a good method of getting visitors, but not for long. Although recently we have combined the resource babene.ru (photo wallpaper) with moskva.com, and this has benefited both resources.
M.I. - before no one knew what kind of babene this is, but now they come in a lot.
Md - And their popularity within moskva.com has greatly increased.
')
- And what gave the greatest increase in visitors later, after receiving the first 10 thousand?
- Time :)
The main growth is due to the fact that current users begin to report and bring their friends to it.
M.I. - And in order for a user to become entrenched and become active, he must go to a resource several times, and it is better to go to different sections. That from the search engines, in some other way ...
Md - As such, the costs of attracting a visitor and what method of attraction gave them to us the most, we did not consider.
- And how many of them are now on the portal?
- More than 200,000 registered, 100,000 runs daily. 40-45% comes from bookmarks, while in the core - 9000 (apparently, the discrepancies in the figures are due to the fact that the discarded referrers are taken into account - PN comment).
10% is a good indicator, about the same on nn.ru.
M.I. - 17-20 000 visitors, of which 1500 - 2000 is the core.
Financing
- And due to what was financed a whole year of development? After all, even then the portal did not immediately become profitable?
Md - First, nn.ru is a fairly profitable project, which allows us to invest profits in other projects. Secondly, the venture investor, whom we attracted, also helped.
To raise a media project in Moscow, you need at least a million dollars, and these funds helped us including to conduct an offline advertising campaign (see below for more on this - P.N.)
- You yourself were looking for an investor, or he came out with a proposal?
- They were looking for themselves.
- And how long did it take?
- It’s not that you’ve been looking for a long time, but you didn’t immediately find it. In general, the process took from six months to a year. Since there was a success story with nn.ru, it certainly helped, both in negotiations and in planning.
- What about the form of ownership? The project was at the initial stage, nothing was ready yet ... I correctly suspect that the investor had a controlling stake?
- This is commercial information, but guesses are welcome ... :)
Actually - yes, he has a controlling stake, but the project management has such a thing as the redemption option to buy out the controlling stake from the investor.
The profit that we began to receive after reaching break-even, in the interests of the investor, is directed to the development of the project. He is interested in the greatest capitalization of the product.
- A fairly common practice in investing. And nn.ru still in your property?
- Yes. There were different offers for sale ... But so far we have not accepted any of them.
Income
- And how much did the project take to break-even?
- More than a year. It happened quite recently.
- Due to a surge in attendance?
“It’s somehow related ... but not directly." We have an advertising business model, and in this case the main thing is brand awareness. In addition to time, it was also influenced by the advertising campaign “One hundred persons of Moscow”, when we hung out 100 billboards around Moscow with images of real users of our site (and not some photo models) with invented slogans. The community under this campaign was very popular, and now users ask us when the campaign will be continued.
The campaign did not give a direct increase in attendance, but increased awareness among advertisers. This is a completely different conversation, when your advertiser himself uses your site. It’s less likely that you’ll be deleted from the media plan.
It is also important that large companies have budgeting at an annual frequency, and now for the first time we have come to this point with a completely finished product. Although the status of "beta" we do not remove ourselves - the project is constantly being finalized.
The main thing that was needed to generate income was to reach customers, that such a format as the “city portal” is generally possible.
- The main income comes from direct customers or from advertising agencies?
- From agencies. But we strive to increase the number of direct customers. And according to the rules of the market, we directly sell placements from small and medium businesses. We have special offers for places that are not offered to agencies and large advertisers, but are sold only to small and medium business customers.
- How much is the portal estimated now, after a significant increase in attendance?
- Now there are several basic forms for assessing the capitalization of an Internet project. There are those that are tied directly to attendance, and there are those that are tied to revenue. And there are the most optimistic - which are tied to the potential attendance and potential revenue :)
According to various estimates, the project is estimated from 3 to 20 million dollars.
- And what is still allowed to succeed?
- And we haven’t achieved it yet :) It was our task for a year - to break the understanding of what the city site is, until we were completely unsuccessful. After all, for Muscovites, the entire Runet consists of urban sites.
Vision
- You also own the domain msk.ru. Why was it decided to stay in the com-zone, and not vice versa - to forward to msk.ru?
- First, the domain in the com-zone is a more reliable asset, what can happen with our domain. Secondly, there would be difficulties with distinguishing names in a third-level domain, because msk.ru is a regional domain.
- And what measures are being taken now?
- We support our communities, I call it community marketing. We try to support any initiatives of users to gather, hang out and so on. At least beer;). The importance of supporting parties is confirmed by the fact that our community “House 2” is more popular than the House-2 forum on TNT. Yesterday, for example, Roma Tretyakov came to our editorial office, gave online interviews. The fans were delighted. By the way, now we are going to their event.
We also have about 20 photographers who attend various events, take pictures of the participants, and then distribute invitations that can be found on moskva.com.
The main thing we aim at is meeting the wishes of our users and creating unique services. For example, we make an environmental map (for pollution) - something that no one has. Specialists mark our cards (this is our own development), put them on the same level as Yandex and Google.
As far as services are concerned, it is possible to single out the linking of users to the cards (the “I am on the card” service), the mail will soon work.
- And who are your main competitors? Do you feel pressure from them?
- We compete both for the audience and for advertising budgets. Our audience, according to Gallup research, does not coincide with its main competitors (lifestyle projects and blog services), but only partially overlaps.
As for competition, these are little things in life;) There is pressure. For example, when we began to show traffic jams, we felt discontent and indirect pressure from Yandex. In the end, I had to remove this product for several reasons. But soon we will again release service on traffic jams, an alternative, which is not yet in runet.
- Are you afraid that the competition at the same time in different areas of divergence will blur the "chip" and the competitive advantages of the portal?
- No, we are not afraid :) this is the main competitive advantage of the portal - different directions under one header.
- As for the satisfaction of the wishes of users - is it a quick development?
- No, the development on the Internet does not happen fast :) If a service is released within a few months, this is already good! But we, of course, try to fix the bugs as quickly as possible.
Results
As a summary of the conversation, I would highlight the following:
Audio recording
ps Habr for some reason incorrectly handles html-code, or I do not know how to insert it. Hence, there are big gaps between paragraphs, and the lack of italics where it is in the code.
NN.RU
Mikhail Denisov begins and continues the conversation, and where the respondent is not marked, the answers are his.
- It all began with the Nizhny Novgorod portal nn.ru. It was back in the 99m year, with the birth, one might say, of the regional Internet. The portal was laid a lot of functionality, different information (as in any urban site), and only one forum. But the thing that concerns communication, shot the most. Now on the resource more than 1000 forums.
And in general, Nizhny Novgorod go to the portal more often than Yandex.
- How did it happen that the local portal beat all-Russian in popularity?
- In general, for the regions it is quite a typical situation. There are portals e1 (Ekaterinburg), ngs (Novosibirsk). In Moscow, this is not the case, because there is a lot of competition from the thematic resources.
- Why, what is it connected with? Do they have other surfing patterns?
- Rather, another idea about the Internet. The mentality is different. There is a city - and its portal, a kind of Internet access point, where they keep their mail, use a portal search.
So it happened - maybe this is a Russian peculiarity like this ... Or regional identity typical for the province. After all, their government, television, radio, clubs, culture, and their Internet are there. Therefore, the regional portal has its popularity. This Muscovites are accustomed to, that the entire Runet - urban site.
- How and due to what gained popularity nn.ru?
- Nn.ru gained popularity because it was thoroughly worked on :) nn.ru grew along with runet, in the urban space of Nizhny Novgorod. In fact, it was a product of the new time, which reflected everything new that appeared on the Internet, and vice versa, often what appeared on nn.ru for the first time - then spread as a practice on other sites of Runet.
So, the idea worked, and we decided to make a website for Moscow. This was in 2005, and in Moscow there were really no such portals (before Mikhail had already said why; and then he would note that there are no real competitors now, PN) There were only some private initiatives.
About a year later, we were finalizing the engine - mainly for communication, especially since Web 2.0 appeared just then. As a result, in terms of communication, he was very strong. Aiming at the end user - he has his own third-level domain, a blog, photohosting without restrictions, video hosting ... And at the end of 2006, in November, they released the project.
- And how much did the development cost as a result?
- Oh, a lot ... Of course, most of them went to programmers salaries. They sit in Nizhny Novgorod, and there are rather big wages, by Russian standards, although, of course, they are not Moscow.
Moskva.com. Visitors
- Due to what managed to attract the first visitors?
- We had several projects in stock, for example, ostrie.ru (a resource with anecdotes told by the users themselves), which we smoothly built into moskva.com. This allowed the first stage to get the first 10 thousand visitors.
This is a good method of getting visitors, but not for long. Although recently we have combined the resource babene.ru (photo wallpaper) with moskva.com, and this has benefited both resources.
M.I. - before no one knew what kind of babene this is, but now they come in a lot.
Md - And their popularity within moskva.com has greatly increased.
')
- And what gave the greatest increase in visitors later, after receiving the first 10 thousand?
- Time :)
The main growth is due to the fact that current users begin to report and bring their friends to it.
M.I. - And in order for a user to become entrenched and become active, he must go to a resource several times, and it is better to go to different sections. That from the search engines, in some other way ...
Md - As such, the costs of attracting a visitor and what method of attraction gave them to us the most, we did not consider.
- And how many of them are now on the portal?
- More than 200,000 registered, 100,000 runs daily. 40-45% comes from bookmarks, while in the core - 9000 (apparently, the discrepancies in the figures are due to the fact that the discarded referrers are taken into account - PN comment).
10% is a good indicator, about the same on nn.ru.
M.I. - 17-20 000 visitors, of which 1500 - 2000 is the core.
Financing
- And due to what was financed a whole year of development? After all, even then the portal did not immediately become profitable?
Md - First, nn.ru is a fairly profitable project, which allows us to invest profits in other projects. Secondly, the venture investor, whom we attracted, also helped.
To raise a media project in Moscow, you need at least a million dollars, and these funds helped us including to conduct an offline advertising campaign (see below for more on this - P.N.)
- You yourself were looking for an investor, or he came out with a proposal?
- They were looking for themselves.
- And how long did it take?
- It’s not that you’ve been looking for a long time, but you didn’t immediately find it. In general, the process took from six months to a year. Since there was a success story with nn.ru, it certainly helped, both in negotiations and in planning.
- What about the form of ownership? The project was at the initial stage, nothing was ready yet ... I correctly suspect that the investor had a controlling stake?
- This is commercial information, but guesses are welcome ... :)
Actually - yes, he has a controlling stake, but the project management has such a thing as the redemption option to buy out the controlling stake from the investor.
The profit that we began to receive after reaching break-even, in the interests of the investor, is directed to the development of the project. He is interested in the greatest capitalization of the product.
- A fairly common practice in investing. And nn.ru still in your property?
- Yes. There were different offers for sale ... But so far we have not accepted any of them.
Income
- And how much did the project take to break-even?
- More than a year. It happened quite recently.
- Due to a surge in attendance?
“It’s somehow related ... but not directly." We have an advertising business model, and in this case the main thing is brand awareness. In addition to time, it was also influenced by the advertising campaign “One hundred persons of Moscow”, when we hung out 100 billboards around Moscow with images of real users of our site (and not some photo models) with invented slogans. The community under this campaign was very popular, and now users ask us when the campaign will be continued.
The campaign did not give a direct increase in attendance, but increased awareness among advertisers. This is a completely different conversation, when your advertiser himself uses your site. It’s less likely that you’ll be deleted from the media plan.
It is also important that large companies have budgeting at an annual frequency, and now for the first time we have come to this point with a completely finished product. Although the status of "beta" we do not remove ourselves - the project is constantly being finalized.
The main thing that was needed to generate income was to reach customers, that such a format as the “city portal” is generally possible.
- The main income comes from direct customers or from advertising agencies?
- From agencies. But we strive to increase the number of direct customers. And according to the rules of the market, we directly sell placements from small and medium businesses. We have special offers for places that are not offered to agencies and large advertisers, but are sold only to small and medium business customers.
- How much is the portal estimated now, after a significant increase in attendance?
- Now there are several basic forms for assessing the capitalization of an Internet project. There are those that are tied directly to attendance, and there are those that are tied to revenue. And there are the most optimistic - which are tied to the potential attendance and potential revenue :)
According to various estimates, the project is estimated from 3 to 20 million dollars.
- And what is still allowed to succeed?
- And we haven’t achieved it yet :) It was our task for a year - to break the understanding of what the city site is, until we were completely unsuccessful. After all, for Muscovites, the entire Runet consists of urban sites.
Vision
- You also own the domain msk.ru. Why was it decided to stay in the com-zone, and not vice versa - to forward to msk.ru?
- First, the domain in the com-zone is a more reliable asset, what can happen with our domain. Secondly, there would be difficulties with distinguishing names in a third-level domain, because msk.ru is a regional domain.
- And what measures are being taken now?
- We support our communities, I call it community marketing. We try to support any initiatives of users to gather, hang out and so on. At least beer;). The importance of supporting parties is confirmed by the fact that our community “House 2” is more popular than the House-2 forum on TNT. Yesterday, for example, Roma Tretyakov came to our editorial office, gave online interviews. The fans were delighted. By the way, now we are going to their event.
We also have about 20 photographers who attend various events, take pictures of the participants, and then distribute invitations that can be found on moskva.com.
The main thing we aim at is meeting the wishes of our users and creating unique services. For example, we make an environmental map (for pollution) - something that no one has. Specialists mark our cards (this is our own development), put them on the same level as Yandex and Google.
As far as services are concerned, it is possible to single out the linking of users to the cards (the “I am on the card” service), the mail will soon work.
- And who are your main competitors? Do you feel pressure from them?
- We compete both for the audience and for advertising budgets. Our audience, according to Gallup research, does not coincide with its main competitors (lifestyle projects and blog services), but only partially overlaps.
As for competition, these are little things in life;) There is pressure. For example, when we began to show traffic jams, we felt discontent and indirect pressure from Yandex. In the end, I had to remove this product for several reasons. But soon we will again release service on traffic jams, an alternative, which is not yet in runet.
- Are you afraid that the competition at the same time in different areas of divergence will blur the "chip" and the competitive advantages of the portal?
- No, we are not afraid :) this is the main competitive advantage of the portal - different directions under one header.
- As for the satisfaction of the wishes of users - is it a quick development?
- No, the development on the Internet does not happen fast :) If a service is released within a few months, this is already good! But we, of course, try to fix the bugs as quickly as possible.
Results
As a summary of the conversation, I would highlight the following:
- Do something small, but successful.
This helped the successful team in Nizhny Novgorod to find an investor for Moscow. - Focus on user requests.
It seems commonplace, but nowadays, many people forget that they are making a resource not for themselves, but for their visitors. And who does it for himself, as a rule, does not achieve great success. Unlike those who seek word-of-mouth marketing.
- Understand the realities of the business of your advertisers and do not make hasty conclusions about yourself.
- Come up with a custom.
In our time, "clone attacks" is quite difficult. Yes, and "ideas for a million" for all good projects may not be enough. Nevertheless, it is innovators (and not only in the service part, but also in advertising) who not only become trendsetters, but also succeed.
Audio recording
ps Habr for some reason incorrectly handles html-code, or I do not know how to insert it. Hence, there are big gaps between paragraphs, and the lack of italics where it is in the code.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/21665/
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