ICQ audience buy for Mail.ru?

A month ago, the first rumors appeared that AOL was negotiating the sale of ICQ, but no one even knew about the buyer's candidature. Now the situation has cleared up.

Today, Vedomosti, citing several sources close to the participants in a potential transaction, confirmed the fact of negotiations between AOL and the Russian investment holding Digital Sky Technologies (DST).

“ICQ audience could be useful for Mail.ru, controlled by DST. The fact is that Mail.ru has a similar project “Agent Agent” with a monthly audience of about 12 million users and ICQ is its main competitor in Russia, ”the Vedomosti newspaper reports.

The amount of the transaction may amount to $ 200-250 million. However, another source (close to the DST manager) said that negotiations were still at an early stage and specific amounts had not yet been discussed.
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It should be noted that ICQ is the most popular Internet pager in Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Israel and some smaller countries. His monthly audience is, according to various estimates, from 33 to 50 million people.

According to Finam, ICQ has an active audience of 42 million people, including 25 million in Russia. This is how the Russian audience is segmented, according to Finam,:

6 million - the official client from the site ICQ;
5 million - Rambler ICQ;
4 million - Yandex ICQ;
10 million - QIP from RBC.

Interestingly, the information from Vedomosti was promptly reprinted by the largest Western Internet publications, including Cnet ( link ) and TechCrunch ( link ). TechCrunch adds that DST is far from the only bidder. Google allegedly participates in the auction, and even to some extent Skype.