How were created and monetized the three most popular entertainment portal in Russia

According to the LiveInternet rating, in the “humor” category , the resources “Fishki.net” and “I cried” occupy the 1st and 2nd places respectively. And the Pikabu portal is leading in the “entertainment” category.

Owners of such sites should find a balance between strict moderation and interesting content without restrictions. If the moderation of the site is weak, then advertisers will be wary of such resources. They do not want to have dubious content next to advertising. Some entertainment resources are more difficult, refusing to copy content from the outside. In such cases, they organize the whole edition. However, sites are not registered as mass media and occupy an undefined status.

The correspondent of "Medusa" Ilya Zhegulev spoke with the owners and representatives of "Fishki.net", "I cried" and Pikabu and found out from them how the business works on entertainment portals, how much you can earn on them. In the conversation, the owner Pikabu for the first time agreed to reveal his name.
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Pikabu

62.9 million visits per month (according to Similarweb)

Maxim Khryashchev created Pikabu in 2009. He studied at the Tax Academy, and he already had one of his projects - the traffic exchange network. Then he came up with a bigger idea - to create an entertainment site in Russia, something like Reddit .

According to Khryashchev, at first very little money was needed. Only two years later, when the audience of the community began to grow rapidly, he hired several more developers on the staff. The main costs he began to go on maintaining servers. Now the project involved 12 people, including freelancers, and spends 12 million rubles a year on Pikabu Khryashchev; half goes to renting servers located in Germany, the rest goes to staff salaries.

According to Khryashchev, none of his employees are engaged in writing or promotion of content. His main task was to come up with a system of motivation for users - so that they leave more likes and post more posts. And he developed a program that would itself monitor and raise the posts that cause the most interest. The more and faster the post gains rating, the higher it is located.

There are no banner ads on Pikabu, but you can place an advertising post on the site - for 30 thousand rubles a day. Among the advertisers, Pikabu even had such serious companies as Beeline, but this does not mean that Khryashchev is a millionaire. In his own words, advertising earns no more than 1.2–1.3 million rubles a month.

Khryashchev says that all profits are invested in development, and he earns about the same amount as other employees - less than 100 thousand rubles a month. The entrepreneur says that the fact that the brand he created is very expensive is what warms him more. According to Khryashchev, more than 2 million dollars.

"I cried"

32.1 million visits per month (according to Similarweb)

I Cried does not even have a legal entity in Russia, and all advertising is sold through a friendly advertising agency. A representative of “I cried” in an interview with Medusa asked not to indicate his name.
The site was opened in May 2004 for the sake of entertainment and communication with friends. At that time, office spam - pictures and jokes among themselves - were shared by employees of, perhaps, all Russian companies.
Advertising on "I cried" too little. “Unfortunately, [advertisers] like social sites or super-white sites like Adme.”

I Cried has its own ways to make money. For example, if negative posts about the activities of certain companies appear on the site, they agree to withdraw them, but only for money. An employee of the site assures that his team itself does not deal with writing such posts: “We are not a creative people.”

"Chips.net"

49.2 million visits per month (according to Similarweb)

Like “I cried”, the site “Fishki.net” was created in 2004 - and also in May. This site was founded by 23-year-old programmer Alexander Rybak, and he, unlike the owners of other resources, was able to make money on it. In 2006, he sold “Fishki.net” for $ 800 thousand to RBC structures. Rybak moved to Germany and, along with Konstantin Shumov, became co-owner of Viboom.

Now the project “Fishki.net” is owned by Mikhail Gurevich. According to him, in 2006 the portal was a “promising garbage dump”, in which there was everything - from politics to erotica. Over the next two years, the site, in his words, "managed to comb and remove erotica." Gurevich says that at low costs, the portal had a 200% profitability. But in 2008 there was a financial crisis - and the entire RBC holding was on the verge of bankruptcy.

“Fishki.net” was sold to outside investors, but in 2013, Gurevich bought it back - now as an independent investor. According to him, he partially invested himself, and partially the purchase was invested by 101StartUp, which he founded with partners, having left RBC. The company acquired 25% of "Fishki.net" for 1.2 million dollars

The ideal that Gurevich is striving for is to make Fishki.net the Russian equivalent of BuzzFeed portal - one of the mainstream entertainment media with a monthly audience of more than 200 million people. Gurevich is building a Russian BuzzFeed with one exception: he promises that there will be no policy on “Fishki.net” until the situation in the country changes.

Unlike I Cried and Pikabu, the content for the main page of Fishek.net is not made by users, but by the editors.
In addition, he says, when you form the content of the main page yourself, the portal becomes understandable to advertisers, who will understand for sure that their banner will not be on the same page as the controversial content. Gurevich plans to recoup his investment in the project by the end of this year.

Many experts believe that entertainment sites should not be more than 3 types of advertising. Otherwise, the owners will lose a large part of their visitors and, of course, earnings.

Direct / ADVERT specialists are sure that it is easiest to monetize such sites:

Sites with comics, memes, viral videos or photos instantly find their audience. It remains only to make money on the growing traffic. And here contextual advertising is not an assistant. Either you get ridiculous money (funnier than your content), or a ban from Adsense, and in Direct can not accept at all.

Some are convinced that the entertainment theme does not bring much income, but this is an excuse for the lazy. If you want to receive not only likes and comments for your work, but also profit - share your platform with reliable partners and networks.