The name of the creator of VK. VKontakte: history, success, known and little-known facts

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Today a malfunction was recorded in the VKontakte social network. The photo application Snapster, released by VKontakte developers two weeks ago, also did not work. It was previously reported that VKontakte is trying to limit users from switching to the Instagram photo service. Now, for some users, links to Instagram photos in posts and personal messages are published as inactive.

Meanwhile, in general, Russian social networks are beating social networksZuckerberg And Brina. Last year, the VKontakte audience grew by 19% and exceeded 66 million, while the number of Odnoklassniki users amounted to 45.6 million people, which is 9% more than in 2013. VKontakte also increased its share mobile users- from 57% in 2013 to 71% last year.

The network affiliation is interesting. Previously we noted that .

WHO OWNS VKONTAKTE?

VKontakte LLC was created on January 19, 2007. According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the founders were a son and a father Vyacheslav And Mikhail Mirilashvili(60% and 10% of the authorized capital respectively), Lev Leviev(10%) and Pavel Durov (20%).

Reference. Durov’s profile was registered first in the Vkontakte.ru system, his third former classmate Vyacheslav (Yitzhak) Mirilashvili, then moved to Israel due to threats, graduated in 2006 Tufts University, USA.

Lev Leviev - born in Volgograd in 1984, studied at the same school with Mirilashvili in Tel Aviv.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Mirilashvili (Misha Kutaissky) - born in 1960 in Georgia. He has lived in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) since 1978. A pediatrician by training. Married, two children. Religion: Judaism. This “authoritative entrepreneur” ran a gambling business in Moscow and St. Petersburg and was the president of the company Russian video sponsored the elections Starovoitova, Deputy President of the Russian Jewish Society Vladimir Gusinsky(Mirilashvili has dual citizenship of Russia and Israel). Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Petromir holding (pharmaceuticals, chemistry, medicine, furniture production, construction, real estate, new technologies, restaurant and hotel business); President of CONTI Corporation (entertainment, gambling and club business); co-owner of the St. Petersburg Open tennis tournament (ATP-Tour series, the largest in the world). He was a member of the management of LUKoil-North-West Oil Products.

In 2001, Mirilashvili was accused of kidnapping two people who kidnapped his father. The murder charge was later dropped, and the prison term was reduced from 12 to 8 years. In his first interview given after his release, he stated that he had become “even more Jewish than before.”

Together in 2013 M. Freeman, G. Khan and other Jewish oligarchs. Included in .

FINANCIAL INDICATORS

According to Alberta Popkova, co-owner of the website Odnoklassniki.ru, expenses for such projects amount to millions of dollars a year, investments will be recouped through advertising. And Vkontakte.ru makes money with the help of a subsidiary recruitment agency.

Mikhail Ravdonikas, public relations coordinator for Vkontakte.ru then said that the agency’s income doubled monthly and reached $50,000 per month. Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki became a phenomenon in 2007. According to the TNS Web Index report, in January 2007 the Moscow daily audience of Yandex was 2.097 million visitors, Mail.ru 2.06 million, Odnoklassniki 1.653 million and Rambler 1.032 million. Gallup does not estimate the audience of Vkontakte.ru .

Leviev and Mirilashvili separately enriched themselves by creating the Selectel company in 2007 and opening a data center to meet VKontakte’s needs for data processing and storage. The social network completely switched to it by 2009 and, until the launch of its own data center in 2012, depended on a single service provider. This allowed Selectel to become a large company with 11% of the data center market by number of server racks by the end of 2011.

In 2010, Leviev and Vyacheslav Mirilashvili created the Vaizra Capital venture fund with representative offices in New York, Israel and St. Petersburg to invest in technology companies at any stage of development, investing in a number of other people’s projects: video hosting Coub, hotel booking service Ostrovok.ru, publishing house "Committee" (includes a publication about the IT industry "Zuckerberg will call", social media TJournal and startup community Spark), online consultant for Livetex sites, community for extreme sports enthusiasts Riders. At the end of 2014, the general fund portfolio included about 30 projects. In August 2014, Leviev announced personal investments in the amount of € 500 thousand in joint with Boaz Behar startup - API platform for Bitcoin developers BlockTrail.

Leviev and Mirilashvili are investors in the funds Yuri Milner DST Global II and DST Global IV

As for the social network itself, today VKontakte is the largest Russian social network, whose monthly audience, according to TNS estimates, is 31.5 million people. The company's revenue in 2012 amounted to 4.8 billion rubles.

TRANSFERS OF OWNERSHIP

As of February 1, 2008, 100% of Vkontakte was transferred to the offshore Doraview Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands.

The first external investor was the fund Digital Sky Technologies Yu.Milner(son) who bought a quarter of the social network in 2007 and later transferred it to the balance of Mail.Ru Group.Gradually, Mail.ru Group began to buy back shares of the VKontakte network. By purchasing another 7.5% of shares. So both Mirilashvili sold Mail.ru - 30%, Leviev - 4%, and Durov - 8% of the company's shares.

In 2011, Mail.ru Group increased its share in the VKontakte social network from 32.49% to 39.99%. The company exercised an option to buy out 7.44% from the founders of the network at a price of $111.7 million. By the end of the year, Mail.ru Group already owned 39.99% of the social network, and the remaining 60% was divided between Durov (12%), Leviev (8 %) and the Mirilashvili family (40%). The transaction was carried out through JPMorgan, which describes the shareholder structure.

In April 2013, Mirilashvili’s share was purchased by United Capital Partners, which heads Ilya Sherbovich, a member of the boards of directors of such large companies as Rosneft, Transneft, and Federal Grid Company. Forbes devoted a special article to how he circumvented legal restrictions and sold Gazprom shares foreign companies. At the same time, it is shown that Shcherbovich is a long-time partner of the Russian government, while engaging in raiding and money laundering through offshore companies.

On January 25, 2014, Durov announced that he sold all his remaining shares (12%) to his friend Ivan Tavrin, director of Megafon.

In September 2014, the VKontakte company sold the remaining 48.01% stake in the social network Mail.ru Group for $1.47 billion.

Thus, Mail.ru Group became the owner of 100% of the shares of the VKontakte social network, since both Megafon and Mail.ru, in turn, belong to the oligarch. Usmanov’s wife was born into a family of Samarkand Jews Irina Viner-Usmanova, which is in charge of the Russian gymnastics team, brought together V. Putin With A. Kabaeva. After which Usmanov actively began buying up all media resources of any importance. It got to the point that even Habrahabr was under his control for some time.

Today, VKontakte is the largest Russian social network, whose monthly audience, according to TNS estimates, is 31.5 million people. The company's revenue in 2012 amounted to 4.8 billion rubles.

It should be noted that, oddly enough, VKontakte - especially in comparison with Facebook - still gives relative freedom to its users - and does not block users for harsh criticism of the regime, the Jewish coup in the former Ukraine, the Kremlin’s betrayal of Donbass, etc. .

Apparently we haven't gotten there yet.

Pavel Durov is a programmer, founder of the largest Russian-language social network VKontakte and its director from 2006 to 2014.

In 2007, Pavel Durov became the winner of the competition for the best young entrepreneurs of the year in the Delovoy Petersburg newspaper. By 2011, Pavel’s capital was estimated at 7.9 billion rubles. Durov took 350th place in the ranking of the richest people in Russia. The cost of the social network Vkontakte by this time was estimated at one and a half billion dollars.

In 2013, he introduced the Telegram messenger with unique encryption technology to users. After being removed from his post as head of VKontakte in 2014, he left Russia and continued to develop Telegram.

Childhood and education

Pavel Valerievich Durov was born on October 10, 1984 into an intelligent Leningrad family. Durov’s father, Valery Semenovich, is a Doctor of Philology, head of the Department of Classical Philology, Faculty of Philology, St. Petersburg State University. Nikolai Valerievich, the elder brother of Pavel Durov, twice became absolute champion world in programming among students.

Pavel went to school in Turin, where his father worked for several years. Soon the family returned to Russia, and, after studying for a short time at a comprehensive school, Pavel entered the Academic Gymnasium at St. Petersburg State University.

Durov studied in a class with in-depth study of four foreign languages. I sat at the first desk due to vision problems. From the age of 11 I was interested in programming, and together with my brother I created my first programs.

His school antics related to hacking are known computer networks: Pavel, out of boredom, changed the screensavers on all the computers in the computer science classroom and easily cracked the passwords that the teachers came up with.

After graduating from the Academic Gymnasium with honors, Durov entered the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University (specialty “English Philology and Translation”).

In general, Pavel Durov is distinguished by a passion for languages: “Teach foreign languages. This will unrealistically expand the depth of perception of the world and open up unprecedented prospects for training, development and career growth,” he once gave this advice to readers on his VKontakte page. It also lists the languages that Pavel Durov speaks: in addition to English, French, German, Spanish and Italian, he knows Latin and Persian.

While studying at the university, he repeatedly won competitions in linguistics, programming and design, was a scholarship recipient of the Government of the Russian Federation, the President of the Russian Federation, became a Potanin Prize laureate for three years in a row, was trained at the military faculty in the specialty “Propaganda and Psychological Warfare”, was a platoon commander Faculty of Philology. He graduated from military training with the rank of reserve lieutenant. In 2006, he completed his studies at the Faculty of Philology with honors, which he still has not taken from the university.

Creation of VKontakte

While still a student, Durov began collecting a database of educational materials for students of humanities faculties, which was located at durov.com. He wanted to unite fellow students scattered across different buildings with the help of a convenient virtual communication resource - this is how the spbgu.ru forum was born. Personal account each user included columns with first and last name, faculty, list of friends and groups, as well as the ability to blog. To promote the site, Durov organized intra-university beauty and design competitions.

One day, his old friend Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, who studied in the States, wrote to Durov. He watched the rapidly growing popularity of social Facebook networks and shared his findings with Pavel. Together they discussed the idea of creating a Russian-language social network. Money for the project was borrowed from Vyacheslav’s father. The founders of the company were Pavel Durov and his friend Lev Leviev with Vyacheslav.

In September 2006, the social network VKontakte was launched. Its founders borrowed the appearance from the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg. The budding entrepreneurs were helped by Nikolai Durov, who took upon himself the optimization of the load on the servers.

Interview with Pavel Durov

At first, registering on VKontakte was possible only by invitation, but already in December 2006 the site became open to all users. During the first year of operation, the number of VK users grew by three million. To attract new users, the site’s management organized competitions, such as “Give iPod to that who brings more friends."

Despite minimizing costs, the new project vitally needed investments to support servers, especially since Contact at that time did not know advertising and was a completely non-profit project. The first investor in VKontakte was Yuri Milner and his Digital Sky Technologies fund, which bought 25% of the shares of the social network for $6.3 million and subsequently sold them to Mail.ru Group.

However, it was impossible to delay the commercialization of the site. In 2007, VKontakte users had the opportunity to increase their ratings and give gifts to friends for virtual currency - “votes”. Two years after the site was launched, the first banners for contextual advertising. By that year, the site had already become a leader in terms of traffic in the Russian-language segment of the Internet, and the number of users reached 20 million.

Pavel rented the top two floors of the famous Singer House on Nevsky Prospekt, where the main office of VKontakte moved.

Since December 2011, Durov has taken an active part in financing startups selected on a competitive basis. The first six selected startups received $25 thousand from Durov. At the beginning of January 2012, Pavel donated $1 million for the development of Wikipedia.

In November 2012, Nikolai Kononov’s documentary book “The Durov Code” was published, dedicated to the development of VKontakte. The rights to film the book were immediately acquired by AR Films. Pavel has an extremely negative attitude towards the film adaptation, however, despite his disapproval, the film's release was scheduled for the end of 2017.

In 2012, singer Sergei Lazarev, concerned about the large volume of pirated content on Russia's largest social network, announced his intention to sue VKontakte. After this, Durov wrote on Twitter that all Lazarev’s songs had been removed from VK, which only increased the cultural value of the site. For some time, when trying to turn on any of the singer’s compositions, users received a message: “The composition has been removed from public access due to lack of cultural value."

His “corporate war” with one of the main shareholders of Vkontakte, the Mail.ru Group, is known, which in 2011 sought to absorb the social network and merge it with the Odnoklassniki website. In 2012, a conflict also broke out between VKontakte and the management of the Vedomosti newspaper, related to one of the site’s innovations, which allows you to view news from third-party resources without clicking on an active link.

Shareholder conflict between Pavel Durov and UCP

In 2011, Dmitry Grishin, the newly appointed director of Mail.ru Group (formerly DST), which also owned the social network Odnoklassniki, announced to Durov his intention to buy out 100% of the shares of VKontakte and merge it with Odnoklassniki, as well as withdraw shares VK for IPO, that is, to offer them for purchase to a wide range of people. Later it became known that the amount of the potential transaction exceeded $2 billion, if we count the Facebook shares Mail.ru had instead of $1.1 billion.

A week after the negotiations between the two “whales” of the RuNet, Durov posted on Instagram a photo of himself with his middle finger stuck out. The indecent gesture was accompanied by the caption: “The official response to the trash holding Mail to its latest attempts to absorb VKontakte.”

Due to the failed deal, Durov subsequently quarreled with his partners – Mirilashvili and Leviev. They sold their stakes in the social network (40% and 8%) to the investment fund UCP (United Capital Partners), without notifying either Durov or the Mail Group. Pavel insisted that the deal was illegal, since under Russian law, before selling his shares, the shareholder is obliged to offer to buy them out to other shareholders.

In turn, UCP was unhappy that Durov was spending time and money on personal projects, namely, the Telegram messenger, launched in August 2013. Durov himself claimed that he developed the messenger with personal funds. The founder of VKontakte was sued for embezzlement of funds. A counterclaim followed: Durov sued the founder of UCP Ilya Shcherbovich, accusing him of buying out the shares of Telegram LLC and Digital Fortress LLC behind his back with the help of his partners with the further intention of blackmailing him into exchanging these shares for half of the shares of Telegram. Both sides subsequently withdrew their claims.

Soon after this, Durov sold the remaining stake (12%) of VKontakte shares to Megafon CEO Ivan Tavrin. Experts estimated the transaction value from $200 million to $400 million. A couple of months later, Tavrin sold the acquired shares of Mail Group, which ultimately became the owner of 52% of the company.

On April 1, 2014, Pavel Durov on his VKontakte page announced his resignation from the post of general director “due to changes in the shareholder composition.” It turned out that on March 21 he submitted his resignation of his own free will. A little later, he explained that the information was a hoax and that he would not leave his post, so easily betraying everything he had done for the site.

On April 16, Durov spoke about the demands of the Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation to hand over data to the organizers of the Euromaidan community and block Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption community Rospil. Durov refused both demands.

On April 21, Durov learned of his dismissal from the media. It turned out that the board of directors of VKontakte found errors in the application for the rollback of the previous application (about leaving at his own request on March 21), and therefore he was automatically removed from his position. “Today VKontakte comes under the full control of Igor Sechin and Alisher Usmanov. Probably, in Russian conditions something like this was inevitable, but I’m glad that we lasted 7 and a half years,” he concluded.

Soon Durov left Russia, taking with him a team of 12 programmers, bought citizenship of the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and Nevis and does not intend to return to his homeland until at least 7 conditions are implemented in Russia. Among them: open courts, elimination of contradictions between laws (deregulation), open elections for leadership positions, maximum taxes on the raw materials sector with the abolition of VAT, economic sovereignty of the regions, reforms of the education system and the “abolition of feudal remnants” such as military service and the cult of registration.

Criticism of Durov

Many of Durov’s eccentric actions and statements are subject to harsh criticism. A wave of angry articles hit him after the action of throwing airplanes with banknotes from the window of his office. Bloggers and journalists call this act of Durov “a merchant’s whim,” and Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky spoke even harsher: “A citizen who treats his people like cattle should get the profession of a seamstress-machine operator in the zone.”

Flying money by Pavel Durov

On the eve of Victory Day on May 9, 2012, Durov again turned RuNet against himself with a statement on Twitter: “67 years ago, Stalin defended from Hitler the right to repress the population of the USSR.” Many bloggers and public figures sharply condemned this post and deleted their VKontakte accounts, and Sergei Minaev called Durov “scum.” Later, Vladislav Tsyplukhin, at that time the press secretary of VKontakte, said that Durov respects Victory Day, and the post on Twitter is related to the fact that his grandfather, who went through the entire Great Patriotic War, was later repressed.

"Pavel Durov" hit a traffic inspector

In 2013, the founder of VKontakte allegedly hit a police officer with his car. A video has appeared on the Internet in which a person similar to Pavel Durov breaks the rules traffic, runs into the inspector, and then disappears from the scene of the accident. It is noteworthy that this story happened precisely at a time when the spheres of influence were being redistributed among the shareholders of Russia’s largest social network.

Personal life of Pavel Durov

A little more than nothing is known about Pavel Durov’s personal life. A number of rather “yellow” media cited excerpts from documents from the St. Petersburg registry office, according to which Durov is the father of two children (born in 2009 and 2010), whose mother is journalist Daria Bondarenko, who graduated from the history department of St. Petersburg State University. The VKontakte press service called this information “tabloid gossip”; Durov himself put it more harshly: “And then I went nuts when I found out this.”

Those who knew Durov even before his wealth and popularity claimed that he once actually dated Daria, but the couple did not have any children.

Pavel Durov now. Telegram against Roskomnadzor

After leaving VKontakte, Pavel Durov took up the development of Telegram, for the maintenance of which he, according to different estimates, spent up to $12 million a year.

In May 2017, Durov came into conflict with Roskomnadzor. The head of the department, Alexander Zharov, did not rule out blocking the messenger on the territory of the Russian Federation due to the refusal of Durov, known for his libertarian views, to cooperate with the authorities and provide them with data for registering the messenger, the very concept of which implied complete anonymity correspondence, for the safety of which Durov feared.

After the refusal, Telegram was hit by an information attack. The largest federal channels aired stories in which Telegram was directly called the main communication channel of terrorists, and FSB representatives stated that the terrorist attack in the St. Petersburg metro was coordinated using the messenger. Businessman Oleg Tinkov called Durov “cattle”, pointedly deleted Telegram from his smartphone and promised money to those who follow his example.

On June 28, Durov nevertheless provided data for registering Telegram in the Russian Federation, but expressed hope that it would not come to providing encryption keys or user data. Otherwise, Pavel said, there will be no cooperation.

New round Telegram confrontation and Russian authorities began in April 2018. On the 13th, the court decided to block the messenger for refusing to give the FSB encryption keys, which, according to Durov, are in principle impossible to provide to anyone technical reasons due to software specifics. On April 16, Roskomnadzor began blocking. Pavel refused to cooperate with the authorities and posted a photo on Instagram on a white horse with the comment: “To be free, you must risk everything for freedom.”

After several days, Telegram was still available to most users. In an attempt to destroy the messenger, Roskomnadzor blocked more than 20 million IP addresses, which led to disruptions in the work of many large services, based on cloud hosting Amazon and Google.

On October 10, 2006, the official launch of the VKontakte social network took place. What happened to the social network over 11 years? Let's remember now!

The hat is very cute. “VKontakte” then still appeared as a “closed directory of students and graduates of elite universities in Russia.” And one of Pavel Durov’s first blogs looked like this:

The site also announces the first competition to invite friends for very good prizes:

In 4 months, VKontakte gained over 50,000 users, a good start. We also managed to find a screenshot of one of the first counters of registered users. A very nice number on it, soon it will increase 10,000 times.

2007

year 2009

In 2009, VKontakte bought the Internet address vk.com - shorter and more convenient for promotion on the global market. The exact amount of the transaction is unknown, but it is clear that it was very large.

Interesting fact: in April 2009, the VKontakte website was visited twice more people than on the Odnoklassniki website, their eternal competitor.

The “Ads” service is launched.

2010 #DurovTake Back the Wall

In February 2010, VKontakte registered its 60 millionth user, and in November the 100 millionth user. In October of the same year, an event occurred that caused a lot of noise: all user pages were switched to microblog mode, it was impossible to go back, and this caused outrage among many. People demanded the return of the familiar wall.

The wall turns into a microblog.
Added "Like" button.
The numeric id can be replaced with " beautiful address» .

This is what the wall looked like before the microblog

2011.

At the beginning of 2011, the VKontakte website closed free registration in order to make it difficult to create fictitious users used for cheating and sending advertisements. It was possible to register only by invitation, which could be sent by one of the users (if he was given such an opportunity). Around the same time, the privacy settings changed: it became impossible to open your posts on the wall only to a certain circle of people, they became publicly available.

Free registration was reopened in July 2011.

Mobile applications for iPhone and Android are being launched.
Added the ability to chat with multiple participants.
Hashtags are being introduced.
Celebrity pages are starting to be verified.

First version mobile applications looked like this:

iPhone version

Android version

year 2012. Moving

In 2012, the VKontakte website finally moved to Domain name VK.

year 2013

In April 2013, it became known that the United Capital Partners investment fund managed by Ilya Shcherbovich (many believe to be close to the Kremlin) bought a 48% stake in VKontakte from Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev. They did not have the right to sell shares without first offering them to other VKontakte shareholders, including Pavel Durov, but they circumvented this restriction by selling not the shares, but the Cypriot companies that owned them. Pavel Durov said that this scheme “smacks of fraud.” The relationship between him and the new shareholder became aggravated from time to time and became public. There were rumors that the UCP Foundation wanted to remove Durov from the post of CEO.

At the same time, Durov devoted time to his new project - a mobile Telegram messenger(communication application). The UCP Foundation was dissatisfied with this.

In the summer, before the “anti-piracy” law came into force, VKontakte removed a lot of music uploaded there illegally.

In 2013, according to Pavel Durov, the number of daily users of VKontakte grew by 14 million, reaching 56 million, and the growth of the audience of Odnoklassniki, its closest competitor, was twice as slow.

year 2014

2016

The news feed becomes “smart”, adapting to the interests of a specific user.
Launch of non-cash money transfers.
It becomes possible to conduct game broadcasts (streams).
The ability to send voice messages is being introduced.
VK is completely changing the design of the full version of the site.

VK design after update in 2016

2017

VK now has the ability to record “Stories”.
A global update of VK mobile applications is taking place.
Limiting music listening in background. Introduction of a paid monthly subscription.

“VKontakte” is one of the most popular today social networks on Russian territory. In Belarus this is the second most visited site, in Ukraine and Kazakhstan it is the third. In the global “popularity ranking” the site occupies a strong 39th position.

Founders of the site - Russian programmer Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai Durov. Pavel is also the creator and co-owner of such well-known student projects as Durov.com (a site aimed at humanities students) and SPBGU.RU (a forum for students of St. Petersburg State University).
Start of a large-scale project

On the Durov.com website in the summer of 2006, many users saw the following news message:

“After a long period of development, my new project for students, which many have asked about, is “VKontakte.ru”. The project will allow students and graduates from a variety of universities and faculties to always stay in contact. This is a technologically sophisticated database of profiles of students and alumni, where we will be united based on places of study, friendships, interests, etc. The picture shows my page.
Yours sincerely,
Pavel Durov".

This was the “first sign” of VKontakte, and shortly after this the site was assigned the domain name vkontakte.ru (October 1, 2006), and this date is considered to be the founding date. But the real “Birthday” was October 10 of the same year - it was on this day that the first functions of the site began to work.

Why VKontakte?

The site was conceived as a way to support communication between students and former graduates of different universities in the country. It could be called “Student.ru”, but sooner or later students finish their studies and lose contact with those with whom they studied for many years. And it was decided that everyone should be “in contact,” that is, in touch. Everyone liked the name (except Durov himself, oddly enough), and now it has almost become a brand.

History of the site in facts and figures

In November 2006, free user registration was opened. Before this, it was possible to get here only by invitation of already registered participants.

January 2007 - VKontakte is one of the 50 fastest growing sites on the Internet.

On September 27 of the same year - VKontakte took third place among the most visited sites in Russia (only Mail.ru and Yandex failed to overtake).

In the same 2007, the site took second place in the popular vote for the Runet Award (losing primacy to the entertainment site bash.org.ru).

February 2008 - VKontakte became available in Ukrainian, and at the end of March of the same year, the site’s audience exceeded 10 million people.

July 2008 - 15 millionth member registered.

In 2009, the number of users is growing rapidly, and VKontakte is overtaking its main competitor, the Odnoklassniki website.

2010 is full of innovations. In April: introduced a new style“Pre-revolutionary” design (with the ability to disable); it becomes possible to change the VKontakte status via SMS; On April 17, the site launched its own payment system; two days after this, VKontakte launches testing of the OpenID service. May brings innovations such as the ability to attach audio and video files to private messages, the “Fans” function becomes available again.

In my opinion, the most memorable events of the past year were the celebration of the fourth birthday of Pavel Durov’s creation (October 10), and the resonance due to the translation of all custom pages into microblog mode without the ability to disable it. As I remember, this happened on the evening of October 20, and literally by the morning of October 21, a riot was brewing; many users instantly created protest groups and threatened to boycott the site. After a few days, the microblog could be turned off at will or left as is.

February 2011 - the daily audience of VKontakte exceeded 23 million visitors. Further - more, today it is already 25 million.

Site owners

For a long time there was not a word about this. The Vesti newspaper conveyed the following information to readers: the founders of VKontakte LLC are Vyacheslav Mirilashvili (60%), Mikhail Mirilashvili (10%), Pavel Durov (20%) and Lev Leviev (10%). Pavel Durov denied this information, and the site’s press service stated that VKontakte’s investors are the Digital Sky Technologies fund.

Not without criticism

Many Russian citizens are against social networks as such, and against Durov as the creator of VKontakte. He is accused of allegedly creating a clone of the equally famous social network Facebook. To such statements, Pavel Durov only responds that he became familiar with the principles of social networks using the example of Facebook, but adapted his own website to domestic system education. And the similarity of the design of both social networks is explained by the fact that he used the open concept of styles described in the book “The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential - Tips, Tricks & Hacks.”

Media reports seem plausible only as long as
until they highlight something you're familiar with from personal experience.
Pavel Durov, founder of VKontakte

The creation of VKontakte was not a brilliant discovery. VKontakte has become a Russian-language analogue of social networks already existing in the world. A service that filled the corresponding niche in the post-Soviet space.

However, if there was no genius in the idea itself, then the timeliness of the creation of VKontakte deserves respect. Today it is the largest social network on the Russian-language Internet. And the 42nd most popular site in the world.

Well, now on my own history of creation of VKontakte and the main stages of the company's development.

The founders of VKontakte, according to the Vedomosti newspaper, are the son of the famous Russian entrepreneur Mikhail Mirilashvili, Vyacheslav, and his grandfather, as well as Pavel Durov and Lev Leviev.

Graduate of the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University. Since childhood, he was fond of programming, and already at school he could boast of such pranks as placing a photo of a computer science teacher with the caption “Must Die” on the screensaver of all school computers. While studying at the university, I created several popular Internet projects among students:

durov.com is a website for students of the humanities, with opportunities to exchange materials useful for studying, which became especially popular during the session.

spbgu.ru - student forum of St. Petersburg University.

Both projects were non-profit, but successful. On spbgu.ru Pavel tried to make changes to traditional look forum - add, in addition to nicknames and avatars, fields for full names, photographs, places of study. However, the very idea of the VKontakte website took shape after a conversation with a school friend, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, who, while studying in the United States, met and became an investor in VKontakte.

Later, Pavel was repeatedly accused of plagiarism and copying Facebook.

§ 1. Brief background

The first Internet resources with a basic set social functions, with the help of which people could interact within the network, appeared in the late 80s of the last century. There was nothing unexpected in this fact - society itself represents groups of people connected by various relationships and therefore forced to contact each other. The Internet has simply introduced new ones for this technical capabilities. The transfer of certain types of communication to the global web greatly facilitated them, so resources with a social direction were very popular and developed rapidly.

It all started with the first bulletin boards and chat rooms. The first, closest to modern look social networks, the site “Six Degrees” launched in 1997, where you could not only create a profile, but also make friends with other users. The next qualitative step was, which differed from previous static sites in the ability constant update user blogs.

The first full-fledged social network, in its current understanding, was Friendster, with the help of which you could find your friends, then, among their lists, new friends, and so on. That is, the network was constantly expanding according to a pattern suggesting that people with mutual friends and acquaintances are more likely to form pairs than those who do not have them.

2003 introduced MySpace to the world. By 2006, it had already become the most popular network in the world. Its innovation consisted in its customization capabilities appearance profile.

The next favorite, Facebook, allowed you to post photos and videos on your profiles. It was originally intended for Harvard students, but quickly included other universities, and then people not related to education. Founded in 2004, it quickly gained popularity and already in 2008 had greatest number users among all services of this kind.

We will stop here because we have already come close to the history of the creation of the most popular network on the Runet today - the VKontakte Internet resource.

§ 2. First days

The alpha version of the social network VKontakte began functioning in the summer of 2006, that is, its chief developer Pavel Durov was almost 22 years old at that time. Beta testing began in September - using the finished version to identify errors before the final release. On October 1, 2006, the domain vkontakte.ru was registered, and the official launch day was October 10. A message about the opening was posted on the website durov.com new base data from student and graduate questionnaires and an image of Pavel Durov’s page. This message remains on the site to this day.

The project appeared as closed. Only students with invitations under their real first and last names could register. At this point, the main services were already working - search, the ability to configure profiles, select a place of study, personal messages, photo albums. An innovation for Runet was the ability to tag people in photos.

After a month and a half, registration became open and began advertising company to increase the number of users. The move taken to attract a new audience turned out to be very successful. A competition to invite friends to the network, with prizes from Apple (iPod nano, iPod Shuffle, iPod video), made the site even more famous. Although even without this, its popularity grew like an avalanche, because as soon as someone from a group of students or friends registered on the site, in a couple of days the rest were there. In just a few weeks, the load exceeded the server's capacity and capacity had to be increased.

Already in January, the resource was among the fifty most promising sites on the Runet in terms of growth rate. In 2007, it was already one of the five most visited. On November 5, the three millionth user registered and by the end of the year VKontakte is second only to mail.ru.

At the end of 2010, the number of users approached 100 million.

§ 3. Owners, cost, profitability

As the resource gained momentum, increasing the number of users and adding new functions, it needed everything more money for the purchase and support of new servers, for expanding the staff. The required amounts amounted to millions of dollars. The owners of VKontakte received many offers to purchase and, in the end, chose the DST fund (Digital Sky Technologies), which received a 24.99% stake in VKontakte for $16.3 million.

From the very beginning, the site was positioned as solely user-oriented, for maximum convenience of search and maintaining connections between people and refrained from advertising.

However, it soon became clear that it was impossible to delay receiving income, given the ever-increasing costs of photo and video hosting. VKontakte still refrained from advertising, but used other tools for making a profit - they started with the ability to increase personal rating via paid SMS messages. Next, they introduced the paid service “Gifts” - pay and send a virtual postcard or item to your friend. Virtual currency was sold for real money.

And yet, the revenue was not enough to pay for the site, so in the summer of 2008 it, as well as the possibility of posting games and other paid services(when paying a “tax” to the site). Placing on the website and online applications by independent developers gives them access and virtual game attributes from the sale. Part of this money goes to the social network. This practice, quite popular among similar sites, brought VKontakte $10 million in 2009 just through the game “Happy Farmer.”

There is information that in general in 2009 the VKontakte website earned about a billion rubles, but it is difficult to say whether it was profitable.

In the spring of 2011, DST (which is now called Mail.ru Group) held a minority stake of 32.5% and is the only third-party investor in the project. Managers of Mail.ru Group have repeatedly stated their intention to completely buy out shares and merge VKontakte with Mail.ru and Odnoklassniki.ru.

However, these statements are refuted by Durov. According to him, there are no plans to change the current state of affairs, in which the founders of VKontakte own a controlling stake. The minority stake owned by Mail.ru Group does not allow him to influence the site's strategy, and this situation will continue. In addition, Pavel again emphasizes that the main goal of VKontakte is not financial enrichment, and that the resource today is compared to other free networks.

In 2011, the company's value was approximately $2 billion.

§ 4. Criticism and problems

The main attacks on VKontakte owners are related to the distribution of pirated content and the presence of pornographic materials on the site. At the beginning of 2011, the site was included in the list of publications that illegally distribute counterfeit goods and copyrighted content, which was compiled based on the results of research by the US administration. Copyright holders claim that half of the video views on the Runet are on VKontakte. Unresolved issues with pirated content are preventing shares from entering Western stock exchanges. Perhaps this was the reason - now you can get an account only by inviting a friend who has indicated the mobile number of the newly created user. In addition, there are promises to launch a “system for preventing the spread of dangerous content” by the end of the year.

In addition to claims about the legality of posting information, the main problem is, of course, the security of the site. Throughout the history of VKontakte, there have been many successful attempts to send spam and different types fraud against users.

§ 5. Prospects

Now the VKontakte audience continues to grow. In terms of the number of users and traffic, the site is still ahead of Odnoklassniki, Moi Mir and the Russian-language segment of Facebook. However, the resources of the Russian-speaking audience have already been exhausted by three quarters (more than 135 million accounts are registered).

From the statements of managers, we can conclude that the company will soon try to enter world markets. They plan to bypass Facebook by meeting the national needs of residents of a particular country.

At the same time, there are also pessimistic forecasts associated with the decline in the popularity of social networks in general.

§ 6. Creative team

The origins of the project, of course, were the legendary Pavel Durov, who was already described above, as well as his brother Nikolai, a mathematician who at one time did a lot to optimize the load on servers and subsequently took the post of technical director.

Now the collective of VKontakte creators is a circle of like-minded programmers, among whom are many of Durov’s university friends. As a rule, only the best, the “very best”, excellent students, graduates of prestigious universities and winners of Olympiads can get into the company. In a word, masters of their craft.

A suitable place for their work has been chosen. In the very center of St. Petersburg, on the main highway of the city, opposite the Kazan Cathedral, there is an office of the VKontakte company, where it moved three years after the start of work. The appearance of the office is quite consistent with her status. The Singer House business center is a large representative building built at the beginning of the 20th century for the Singer company.

The luxurious office has all the conditions for work and good rest, however, the requirements for the team are strict: employees are prohibited from smoking and drinking alcohol at work, even at corporate events; quarrels among themselves and the use of obscene language are also unacceptable.

In 2011, VKontakte employees took first place in Europe at the World Programming Championship. Alexey Levin, Valentin Fondaratov and Arseny Smirnov represented St. Petersburg State University and received a gold medal, as well as fourth place in the world. In 2001, Nikolai Durov won first place at this championship.

Here, in fact, is far from complete, but an impressive story of the creation of VKontakte - the success story of one of the most successful Internet projects on the Runet.