In today's Vedomosti, not far from the news about Rambler and Runner, there is a small reviewer from Alexander Plyushchev (herald of Web 2.0 for Vedomosti from Ekho Moskvy :).

In general, the news as news, but still some kind of superficial. And if you dig deeper, it will be more interesting.
First of all. By and large Vkontakte is not a competitor to Odnoklassniki, but a project in a separate niche - students. But there already is fakultet.ru.
')
Here in the figure the distribution of accounts by year of release.

As we see, their main audience is current students of 2,3 and 4 courses. And the classmates have a very weak audience.
Secondly. The project is not just added to the list of social networks, he shot! For five months, the project scored almost 290 thousand visitors a week! But even this is not the most interesting. On average, 1 Vkontakte visitor is online 7 times a month and makes more than 500 hits!
Thirdly. Not everything is so rosy :) Well, firstly, they have 65% of St. Petersburg students (and another 25% from Moscow). However, this can be considered as a potential for growth! Secondly, they themselves contribute to the generation of such traffic, skillfully using the notification system. The theme of the notification is usually the community in which you are constantly invited. For a month I was invited to 12 communities. One of which was called something like "Community against boorish grannies with trolley bags." Those. from the point of view of advertisers, their audience is far from ideal. St. Petersburg students are not the best audience :)
But in any case, Vkontakte is certainly one of the few cases of a very successfully launched Web 2.0 project in Runet.
In general, if it is not just a resource for the fun of the creators, the guys need to sell out or start being in partnership with someone. Whatever their audience is, they have it and are very extensive. You can monetize it somehow.
However, now the creators flatly refuse to discuss the purchase of their offspring ... Although after this article in Vedomosti, they will greatly increase their telephone calls on the topic of “offers that are advantageous to both parties” ... Although maybe the guys are just filling the price.