Mail.Ru called "absurd" a rating of sites from "Yandex" and demands to remove its brands from it

Yesterday, Yandex launched the Yandex.Radar project - a rating of the most popular resources in runet, which is based on a mathematical model based on aggregated data from Yandex.Browser. If desired, sites can connect data from Yandex.Metrica to add demographic data to the audience, etc.

The new service was not liked by everyone. The main competitor of Yandex in the Russian segment of Mail.Ru immediately declared that it did not trust this metric and asked them to remove their sites from the rating.

Mail.Ru believes that Yandex itself is a player in the advertising market, and therefore it is incorrect for him to maintain such a rating. In addition, it deliberately incorrectly reflects the audience of the sites, since it relies on the data provided by Yandez.Brouser. That is, the inflated figures will be at sites where the share of Yandex.Browser users is high. Obviously, these are loyal to Yandex resources.
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In the illustration: the top 10 most popular sites on the Russian version of Yandex for the period from 1 to 9 November 2018 (in millions). Blue denotes sites that have provided their data, red is the evaluation of the Yandex mathematical model.

“The situation when one of the largest players in the Russian advertising market measures this market looks absurd. The company's interest in this situation is too great - approximately as if television ratings were measured and published by one of the TV channels, the Mail.Ru Group reported . - In its current form, the project will underestimate the audience of almost all major foreign players (Google, Facebook, AliExpress), as well as those of Russia who will not deliver the Metrics counter: Mail.Ru, Odnoklassniki, VKontakte and we are sure many other major sites with which the company “Yandex” competes in various fields ”.

Mail.Ru refuses to put the Metrics counter, because “it has unique knowledge about the audience of its projects, and this knowledge is of great market value. Yandex is a commercial company and our competitor, we are not ready to put its counters on all our projects, passing it a huge amount of valuable information. ”

Proceeding from this, Mail.Ru refuses to participate in the rating with its projects (Mail, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Mail.Ru portal, media projects, Games, etc.) and demands to remove those belonging to brands to her: “We believe that the right not to participate in the rating should be given to any Internet site, regardless of whether the Yandex counter is installed on it or not,” the statement said. “We are ready, together with all major market participants, including Yandex, to support and develop independent methods of measurement, such as the Mediascope project, which is a recognized measure of media performance in many advertising markets.”

Yandex believes that the rating will be useful for advertisers, marketers, media and site owners: “It is important for any advertiser to know what kind of audience they can attract and how effective their investments will be. About 80% of large advertisers and agencies plan their budget, based on data from analytical systems - usually two or more. With the help of our rating, they will be able to get the full picture, since it takes into account the attendance of all sites - such a tool on the market has been waiting for, ” said the commercial director of Yandex, Leonid Savkov.

Yandex has not yet given an official response. But he is unlikely to agree to remove sites belonging to Mail.Ru from the rating, because in this case the rating will lose a significant part of its objectivity. In theory, Mail.Ru does not have the exclusive right to assess the attendance of its sites. In addition, in the case of such a precedent, similar requirements can be set by the owners of other sites, and then the rating will become completely incomplete.

The launch of the rating of sites "Yandex" announced in September this year. Already then it was reported that the audience of Google and Mail.Ru Group will be calculated based on their own data from Yandex. In a comment to Vedomosti, Mail.Ru Group representatives said that the company is not ready to join the competitor rating. Google declined to comment.

Despite the “unavailability” of Mail.Ru, its projects were included in the rating.