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Billboards in Moscow: Google’s act of desperation

Ernst-Jan Written on June 7, 2008 – 10:03 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

We’ve recently reported that the Russian search market is dominated by native search engines like Yandex. This leading service was recently valuated at $5 billion and is preparing for an IPO on Nasdaq this autumn. That must have scared Google, as they’ve launched an outdoor campaign called “Moscow 2.0″ - “Know more on Google.ru“.

man sleeping on google ad

According to industry analysts, Google has invested $0.5 million in this traditional way of advertising - which comes down to $250,000 per month. That has bought them 550,000 ad places all over Moscow - reports Quintura -, which Google has covered with 24 billboards, 58 benches and 450,000 thousand stickers. Where’s the 2.0 part, you might wonder. Well, Russian can embed their city snap shots and videos in Google Maps. How does that feel, Yandex? Already frightened?

I hope you like that post!

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About the author: Ernst-Jan is a blogger and journalist, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five.

4 comments/trackbacks to “Billboards in Moscow: Google’s act of desperation”

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    [...] Google has covered with 24 billboards, 58 benches and 450,000 thousand stickers…. source: Billboards in Moscow: Google’s act of desperation, The Next [...]

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    [...] few weeks ago I wrote a sarcastic article about Google’s efforts to gain popularity in Russia. Native search engines like Yandex and [...]

  3. Aug 4, 2008: Russian mining and publishing billionaire goes after a stake in Yandex

    [...] a new loner in the wild west of Russian search engine land, where millions of dollars are spent and Google is just small potatoes. Alisher Usmanov is his name. This man is the founder of Metalloinvest (mining company, €3.3 [...]

  1. By Andrus on Jun 8, 2008

    Wasnt Googles problem that their search results in Russian were not as good as the ones through Yandex?

    did they overcome that?

    And I always thought that google has not advertised their products offline.

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