Yuri Zisser: "We chose Yahoo's business model"
The largest Belarusian portal Tut.By was created by two students and a freshman programmer. A couple of months after its opening, the new site became the leader in attendance. Now, according to his executives, he controls about a third of all traffic on Bynet and shows almost half of all Belarusian Internet advertising. The founder of the portal, Yuri Zisser, is confident that he was able to successfully adopt the business model of Yahoo, and his company of 18 people will give a head start in terms of profit per employee.
For the entire time since the start of work on October 5, 2000, Tut.By has attracted absolutely no external investment. The only investor was Yuri Zisser. It was he who six years ago organized this project under the roof of his company "Reliable programs", which, since 1992, has produced mainly banking software.
The project came to payback only at the end of 2002, and soon Tut.By began to bring so much money that Yuri sold his banking business to competitors in January 2005 and devoted himself to a new business. Thus, his company has now become a real Internet company, which plans to receive about $ 500 thousand from Internet advertising only this year. Probably, its creator conceived it in the late 90s, when he witnessed a “gold rush” in America dotcom and saw driving around the streets of New York purple taxi with the logo of Yahoo.
')
Now Yury Zisser spends his whole days in an office in the very center of Minsk. The entrance to the building from the side of the Catholic church, near the monument to Lenin, under which the Belarusian builders, by order of the Farther, dug a huge shopping complex in the manner of Manege Square. Yuri Zisser together with his permanent assistant Kirill Voloshin (deputy director of “Reliable programs” and general director of Tut.By) drinks tea with a cake and remembers how they started this business.
There are legends that the idea of ​​creating a portal came to Yuri during one of his many business trips to America?
Yuri Zisser: Actually, we have a section with an official history on our site. It clearly states that on March 8, 2000, I read the forum of the newspaper “Computer News” (KV) and there I saw one replica. Someone wrote that, they say, I have a super-idea and I will give it to anyone who takes it to implement.
Kirill Voloshin: (laughs) And I knew a different version of the creation of the portal ...
Yu.Z. Cyril, you would sometimes read your own site. We have this version in the “History” section, and there is even a link to that “KV” forum where this notorious message is published.
Then I wrote on the same forum and left my contact details there. Two days later, Sergey Dmitriev came to me [this is the author's pseudonym of a famous Belarusian journalist and businessman - approx. AA] and said: let's open a free mail server.
Was it posting on the forum?
Yu.Z. Yes it is. But I thought: what the hell to create a mailer, he does not bring any money! In general, since the end of 1999, I began to figure out that it was necessary to “stir up” something on the Internet, but I did not know which end to approach. I saw what was happening in America: there, at the end of the 90s, ten thousand dot-com appeared simultaneously. The idea of ​​a free postal service did not inspire me at all. It was necessary to create something more serious. And so Dmitriev brought with him one of his colleagues.
K.V. Another journalist.
Yu.Z. Yes, he brought Andrei Kononovich and said that his function was exhausted there. He wanted to make only mail, but he considers the portal an idea to be wrong and will not take part in it, turned around and left, and we never saw him again before launching the portal. And Andrei Kononovich took up this business as a project manager. The first programmer at BSUIR Danil Rudenko, whom he knew from birth, became the lead programmer. I knew about his talent, because he had already done a small project for my American customers, just the mail server. Then Kirill Voloshin joined, and the three of them did it all. Andrei led Kirill Voloshin as a change for himself. He said that he would launch the project and washes his hands on it. He had other plans for the future ... [Approx. A.A. - Andrei Kononovich, having changed several jobs in Belarus, is now studying under the MBA program at the University of Michigan and will continue his career, perhaps somewhere in Europe] .
Yu.Z. And Cyril came and stayed.
You originally wanted to make a portal?
Yu.Z. Of course, the portal. I even had no such question.
Who did you take as a sample?
Yu.Z. Yahoo . In my opinion, even in our very first interview we just said: we want to make Belarusian Yahoo. At that time, Yahoo was the most developed resource, and all the other Western resources that I saw, we were not applicable. We at that time simply would not have an audience for them.
So, from the very beginning you were planning to get the main profit from advertising?
Yu.Z. Yes, a complete copy of the Yahoo business model and its application to our realities.
Then you had only two types of paid services: advertising and hosting?
Yu.Z. Yes, advertising and hosting. As now, actually. Nothing changed. At first, hosting and advertising went the same way, giving us equal shares of profit. But a year later, advertising has pulled ahead, and now hosting gives us only about fifteen percent.
Does hosting give such a small share of profits?
K.V. Well, what percentage of the profit he can give, if the hosting is paid $ 50 per year, and for one simple news - $ 150 per day!
Yu.Z. And hosting is constantly cheaper, and advertising has become more expensive.
What about other services besides hosting and advertising? Consulting, website development?
Yu.Z. Consulting is generally a free service, and the development of sites is carried out by our partner - the company Astronim . We generally have many partners. Since we ourselves are not strong in everything, we make alliances. Our task is to ensure attendance, and let others do the rest.
And there were many partners in the history of Tut.By?
K.V. In general, more than half of the portal resources are not created by us, but by our partners.
I know that you managed to shelter many content projects . Some then continued to develop independently. So, you seem to be playing the role of the organizational center of the Belarusian Internet, a kind of incubator?
Yu.Z. I once said that Tut.By is the center of crystallization of Bynet. To some extent, we still manage this role.
Have you organized competitions for the best projects and offered them free hosting?
Yu.Z. Yes, that was the idea of ​​the competition. New sections on the portal are opening constantly. In the future, there will be a tourist section (maybe not this year) and a photo service, for which we have already found a partner. We want to open blogs, we ourselves make them.
Do we have a blogger platform in Belarus? Vopnyarsky 's project “Blogs on Inf.By” .
Yu.Z. (asks Voloshin with a smile) Kira, do you think we will do it by attendance in a day or will we need it?
And besides blogs, what else do you plan to open?
K.V. Global car project and small entertainment. We will also connect “Sitodrom” to a free hosting so that you can quickly create websites. Auctions will be ...
That you have planned for sure. I wonder what you want to open in perspective?
Yu.Z. Everything! Here's how the Americans say: one stop site so that we can find everything.
As for “finding everything”, one of your partners, Yandex, is immediately recalled. Tell us how cooperation with them began.
Yu.Z. We needed to implement a search. Writing your own search engine in the twenty-first century without resources is ridiculous. Therefore, we decided to choose some other search engine and get their search results. On Mail.Ru was Google . We even wrote a letter to Google, but received no answer, and obviously it would be expensive, especially since at that time Google search did not understand Russian word forms. Well, the search on Yandex has always been better than the search on the Rambler , so we turned to them. We agreed with them on the RIF .
K.V. No, even before the RIF, we started using the “Regional Search”, which allowed in the design of “Yandex” to receive search results on a random sample of sites. Accordingly, we prepared a database based on our catalog of Belarusian sites, leaked this database to Yandex, and for the first six months, the search for Belarus was carried out in this way, in the Yandex interface.
Later, Yandex.XML appeared, which we agreed with them on the REEF. He allowed to make a search in our design and demanded payment. We regularly paid for it. But about a year ago, Yandex, driven by Runner and other competitors, entered the autocontext market and began to expand its advertising space at the expense of some major sites, including us.
Yu.Z. That is, before we paid them, and now they pay us.
After all, you yourself also place contextual advertising in search results?
Yu.Z. Only banner. We gave the textual text to our partners from Eniro.
Who, sorry?
K.V. "Eniro Belfakta". This is a company that makes reference books "Business-Belarus" and "Contact". Now they sell and our textual contextual advertising. And the media left us.
Yu.Z. We do what we are strong at, and the retail sale of words does not apply here. How we tormented ourselves with this context ... Some client comes to us to buy words on our search. Tanya Alexeyeva is sitting here (pointing in her direction) and has been processing it for two hours, explaining what contextual advertising is. Well, and then he orders advertising for twenty dollars, and these banners of ten cents per click are unscrewed for six months, because we don’t have such a terrible attendance as on Yandex [about 70.000 search queries pass through Tut.By . A.A.] .
On the other hand, Eniro has fifteen sales managers, and they are very good sellers. As soon as we opened, they immediately came to us: two such cunning aunts appeared and we were spun on three hundred bucks for advertising. They were then selling keywords in the Infoline 085 telephone helpline. If someone called the reference and called the keyword "Internet services", then he was given our coordinates. Therefore, if they sell keywords in the directory and by phone, then why should they not sell on the Internet too?
So, in Belarus, contextual advertising first appeared on the phone and only then on the Internet?
Yu.Z. (laughs) It turns out, so. Generally, on the Belarusian Internet contextual advertising for some reason did not go. All over the world went, but we have not. In general, our country is small, few economic entities - what is there to look for? In Belarus, 80% of the economy is state-owned enterprises that are not advertised, and 70% of the economy is exported. Who needs advertising here? According to various sources, the entire advertising market is totally $40-50 million per year. This is television, radio, newspapers and everything else taken together.
K.V. Plus, there is no popular payment system in the country, which allows you to pay for the context order through an automatic sales system such as Direct without a visit to our office and drawing up a paper contract.
Yes, in one Runet advertising twice. But back to your organizational structure. Are you trying to outsource any task to simplify management?
Yu.Z. Therefore, too, in order not to lose the initiative, do not get bogged down in trifles. We have a total of 18 people: four people in the technical department, two hosting managers ...
K.V. They are the administrators of the forums, they manage the moderators who work on the forums voluntarily.
Yu.Z. Another editor-in-chief, content projects manager, marketing director, three sales managers for online advertising, four-person bookkeeping, and two of us. Everything. In three small rooms fit.
Little…
Yu.Z. If we did everything ourselves, we would have a hundred people. A part of Astronim works for us. We have two hosting sites in Moscow and Minsk, to which we pay money for technical support. Most projects are with partners.
I wonder how long after its creation, the portal Tut.By came out on top in terms of attendance on the Belarusian Internet?
K.V. Immediately I came out in 2000. We had this search curve, which was through Yandex in their interface, a week later in terms of the number of requests ahead of the search engine of the company Open Contact . We overtook them rather quickly after a massive PR campaign in the media and distribution of cakes with the inscription “Tut.By” at thePTS-2000 exhibition ... a week after the opening.
Yu.Z. It is hard to say. I have our old statistics, but there is no “Open Contact” statistics. In general, we carried out the first statistics on paper, because there was no statistical system, we made such tables, and Kira contributed every day how many hits, banner displays, mailboxes were recorded. All this is preserved.
Have these leaves been preserved?
Yu.Z. But how! (He takes out a thick folder from the cabinet with several hundreds of documents attached and starts flipping) . Here is the first business plan - Kira did, here is the declaration of intentions, drawn up in March 2000, I already wrote this, but here is the statistics of visits.
Judging by the handwritten tables, on the first day of October 5, the site had a little more than a hundred hits, in two weeks - 52,000 per day, and in April 2001 the daily traffic exceeded 1,200,000.
Yu.Z. And then the statistics have already gone in electronic form ... (Scrolls through the folder) .
Do you often watch this album?
Yu.Z. No, I have not opened it for a couple of years. I just know where it is ...
Yuri Zisser continues to flip through the album, with a smile recalling the time when they were just starting an online business. It will soon be six years, as they are trying to clearly follow the business model of Yahoo. In fact, Tut.By can already be recognized as a successful project. Probably, its owners have already earned their first million dollars, but they clearly do not want to dwell on this.
For the entire time since the start of work on October 5, 2000, Tut.By has attracted absolutely no external investment. The only investor was Yuri Zisser. It was he who six years ago organized this project under the roof of his company "Reliable programs", which, since 1992, has produced mainly banking software.
The project came to payback only at the end of 2002, and soon Tut.By began to bring so much money that Yuri sold his banking business to competitors in January 2005 and devoted himself to a new business. Thus, his company has now become a real Internet company, which plans to receive about $ 500 thousand from Internet advertising only this year. Probably, its creator conceived it in the late 90s, when he witnessed a “gold rush” in America dotcom and saw driving around the streets of New York purple taxi with the logo of Yahoo.
')
Now Yury Zisser spends his whole days in an office in the very center of Minsk. The entrance to the building from the side of the Catholic church, near the monument to Lenin, under which the Belarusian builders, by order of the Farther, dug a huge shopping complex in the manner of Manege Square. Yuri Zisser together with his permanent assistant Kirill Voloshin (deputy director of “Reliable programs” and general director of Tut.By) drinks tea with a cake and remembers how they started this business.
There are legends that the idea of ​​creating a portal came to Yuri during one of his many business trips to America?
Yuri Zisser: Actually, we have a section with an official history on our site. It clearly states that on March 8, 2000, I read the forum of the newspaper “Computer News” (KV) and there I saw one replica. Someone wrote that, they say, I have a super-idea and I will give it to anyone who takes it to implement.
Kirill Voloshin: (laughs) And I knew a different version of the creation of the portal ...
Yu.Z. Cyril, you would sometimes read your own site. We have this version in the “History” section, and there is even a link to that “KV” forum where this notorious message is published.
Then I wrote on the same forum and left my contact details there. Two days later, Sergey Dmitriev came to me [this is the author's pseudonym of a famous Belarusian journalist and businessman - approx. AA] and said: let's open a free mail server.
Was it posting on the forum?
Yu.Z. Yes it is. But I thought: what the hell to create a mailer, he does not bring any money! In general, since the end of 1999, I began to figure out that it was necessary to “stir up” something on the Internet, but I did not know which end to approach. I saw what was happening in America: there, at the end of the 90s, ten thousand dot-com appeared simultaneously. The idea of ​​a free postal service did not inspire me at all. It was necessary to create something more serious. And so Dmitriev brought with him one of his colleagues.
K.V. Another journalist.
Yu.Z. Yes, he brought Andrei Kononovich and said that his function was exhausted there. He wanted to make only mail, but he considers the portal an idea to be wrong and will not take part in it, turned around and left, and we never saw him again before launching the portal. And Andrei Kononovich took up this business as a project manager. The first programmer at BSUIR Danil Rudenko, whom he knew from birth, became the lead programmer. I knew about his talent, because he had already done a small project for my American customers, just the mail server. Then Kirill Voloshin joined, and the three of them did it all. Andrei led Kirill Voloshin as a change for himself. He said that he would launch the project and washes his hands on it. He had other plans for the future ... [Approx. A.A. - Andrei Kononovich, having changed several jobs in Belarus, is now studying under the MBA program at the University of Michigan and will continue his career, perhaps somewhere in Europe] .
Yu.Z. And Cyril came and stayed.
You originally wanted to make a portal?
Yu.Z. Of course, the portal. I even had no such question.
Who did you take as a sample?
Yu.Z. Yahoo . In my opinion, even in our very first interview we just said: we want to make Belarusian Yahoo. At that time, Yahoo was the most developed resource, and all the other Western resources that I saw, we were not applicable. We at that time simply would not have an audience for them.
So, from the very beginning you were planning to get the main profit from advertising?
Yu.Z. Yes, a complete copy of the Yahoo business model and its application to our realities.
Then you had only two types of paid services: advertising and hosting?
Yu.Z. Yes, advertising and hosting. As now, actually. Nothing changed. At first, hosting and advertising went the same way, giving us equal shares of profit. But a year later, advertising has pulled ahead, and now hosting gives us only about fifteen percent.
Does hosting give such a small share of profits?
K.V. Well, what percentage of the profit he can give, if the hosting is paid $ 50 per year, and for one simple news - $ 150 per day!
Yu.Z. And hosting is constantly cheaper, and advertising has become more expensive.
What about other services besides hosting and advertising? Consulting, website development?
Yu.Z. Consulting is generally a free service, and the development of sites is carried out by our partner - the company Astronim . We generally have many partners. Since we ourselves are not strong in everything, we make alliances. Our task is to ensure attendance, and let others do the rest.
And there were many partners in the history of Tut.By?
K.V. In general, more than half of the portal resources are not created by us, but by our partners.
I know that you managed to shelter many content projects . Some then continued to develop independently. So, you seem to be playing the role of the organizational center of the Belarusian Internet, a kind of incubator?
Yu.Z. I once said that Tut.By is the center of crystallization of Bynet. To some extent, we still manage this role.
Have you organized competitions for the best projects and offered them free hosting?
Yu.Z. Yes, that was the idea of ​​the competition. New sections on the portal are opening constantly. In the future, there will be a tourist section (maybe not this year) and a photo service, for which we have already found a partner. We want to open blogs, we ourselves make them.
Do we have a blogger platform in Belarus? Vopnyarsky 's project “Blogs on Inf.By” .
Yu.Z. (asks Voloshin with a smile) Kira, do you think we will do it by attendance in a day or will we need it?
And besides blogs, what else do you plan to open?
K.V. Global car project and small entertainment. We will also connect “Sitodrom” to a free hosting so that you can quickly create websites. Auctions will be ...
That you have planned for sure. I wonder what you want to open in perspective?
Yu.Z. Everything! Here's how the Americans say: one stop site so that we can find everything.
As for “finding everything”, one of your partners, Yandex, is immediately recalled. Tell us how cooperation with them began.
Yu.Z. We needed to implement a search. Writing your own search engine in the twenty-first century without resources is ridiculous. Therefore, we decided to choose some other search engine and get their search results. On Mail.Ru was Google . We even wrote a letter to Google, but received no answer, and obviously it would be expensive, especially since at that time Google search did not understand Russian word forms. Well, the search on Yandex has always been better than the search on the Rambler , so we turned to them. We agreed with them on the RIF .
K.V. No, even before the RIF, we started using the “Regional Search”, which allowed in the design of “Yandex” to receive search results on a random sample of sites. Accordingly, we prepared a database based on our catalog of Belarusian sites, leaked this database to Yandex, and for the first six months, the search for Belarus was carried out in this way, in the Yandex interface.
Later, Yandex.XML appeared, which we agreed with them on the REEF. He allowed to make a search in our design and demanded payment. We regularly paid for it. But about a year ago, Yandex, driven by Runner and other competitors, entered the autocontext market and began to expand its advertising space at the expense of some major sites, including us.
Yu.Z. That is, before we paid them, and now they pay us.
After all, you yourself also place contextual advertising in search results?
Yu.Z. Only banner. We gave the textual text to our partners from Eniro.
Who, sorry?
K.V. "Eniro Belfakta". This is a company that makes reference books "Business-Belarus" and "Contact". Now they sell and our textual contextual advertising. And the media left us.
Yu.Z. We do what we are strong at, and the retail sale of words does not apply here. How we tormented ourselves with this context ... Some client comes to us to buy words on our search. Tanya Alexeyeva is sitting here (pointing in her direction) and has been processing it for two hours, explaining what contextual advertising is. Well, and then he orders advertising for twenty dollars, and these banners of ten cents per click are unscrewed for six months, because we don’t have such a terrible attendance as on Yandex [about 70.000 search queries pass through Tut.By . A.A.] .
On the other hand, Eniro has fifteen sales managers, and they are very good sellers. As soon as we opened, they immediately came to us: two such cunning aunts appeared and we were spun on three hundred bucks for advertising. They were then selling keywords in the Infoline 085 telephone helpline. If someone called the reference and called the keyword "Internet services", then he was given our coordinates. Therefore, if they sell keywords in the directory and by phone, then why should they not sell on the Internet too?
So, in Belarus, contextual advertising first appeared on the phone and only then on the Internet?
Yu.Z. (laughs) It turns out, so. Generally, on the Belarusian Internet contextual advertising for some reason did not go. All over the world went, but we have not. In general, our country is small, few economic entities - what is there to look for? In Belarus, 80% of the economy is state-owned enterprises that are not advertised, and 70% of the economy is exported. Who needs advertising here? According to various sources, the entire advertising market is totally $
K.V. Plus, there is no popular payment system in the country, which allows you to pay for the context order through an automatic sales system such as Direct without a visit to our office and drawing up a paper contract.
Yes, in one Runet advertising twice. But back to your organizational structure. Are you trying to outsource any task to simplify management?
Yu.Z. Therefore, too, in order not to lose the initiative, do not get bogged down in trifles. We have a total of 18 people: four people in the technical department, two hosting managers ...
K.V. They are the administrators of the forums, they manage the moderators who work on the forums voluntarily.
Yu.Z. Another editor-in-chief, content projects manager, marketing director, three sales managers for online advertising, four-person bookkeeping, and two of us. Everything. In three small rooms fit.
Little…
Yu.Z. If we did everything ourselves, we would have a hundred people. A part of Astronim works for us. We have two hosting sites in Moscow and Minsk, to which we pay money for technical support. Most projects are with partners.
I wonder how long after its creation, the portal Tut.By came out on top in terms of attendance on the Belarusian Internet?
K.V. Immediately I came out in 2000. We had this search curve, which was through Yandex in their interface, a week later in terms of the number of requests ahead of the search engine of the company Open Contact . We overtook them rather quickly after a massive PR campaign in the media and distribution of cakes with the inscription “Tut.By” at the
Yu.Z. It is hard to say. I have our old statistics, but there is no “Open Contact” statistics. In general, we carried out the first statistics on paper, because there was no statistical system, we made such tables, and Kira contributed every day how many hits, banner displays, mailboxes were recorded. All this is preserved.
Have these leaves been preserved?
Yu.Z. But how! (He takes out a thick folder from the cabinet with several hundreds of documents attached and starts flipping) . Here is the first business plan - Kira did, here is the declaration of intentions, drawn up in March 2000, I already wrote this, but here is the statistics of visits.
Judging by the handwritten tables, on the first day of October 5, the site had a little more than a hundred hits, in two weeks - 52,000 per day, and in April 2001 the daily traffic exceeded 1,200,000.
Yu.Z. And then the statistics have already gone in electronic form ... (Scrolls through the folder) .
Do you often watch this album?
Yu.Z. No, I have not opened it for a couple of years. I just know where it is ...
Yuri Zisser continues to flip through the album, with a smile recalling the time when they were just starting an online business. It will soon be six years, as they are trying to clearly follow the business model of Yahoo. In fact, Tut.By can already be recognized as a successful project. Probably, its owners have already earned their first million dollars, but they clearly do not want to dwell on this.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/4285/
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