OREANDA-NEWS. January 25, 2011. Yandex announced its preliminary unaudited financial results for 2010. The company's ruble revenue* grew 43% compared to 2009 and reached 12.5 billion rubles (USD 410 million**).

Yandex’s business model is based principally on contextual advertising. In 2010, contextual ads accounted for 88% of the company’s revenues. Revenues from contextual advertising grew 45% year-over-year. According to the Russian Association of Communication Agencies (RACA), during the first nine months of 2010, the overall Russian ad market increased by 14%, while the online advertising market showed a 37% growth. In 2010, the number of advertisers on Yandex increased by over 40% year-over-year and totaled more than 180,000.

“The highlight of 2010, as we see it, is that by constantly improving our product quality we managed to increase our share in the search market,” says Arkady Volozh, CEO. “The considerable revenue increase we report this year reflects two important trends — a post-crisis revival of the small and medium-sized businesses and a shift in advertising expenditures from other channels towards online advertising”.

According to LiveInternet, Yandex’s share of the Russian search market grew by 5.2 pp (to 64.1% in December 2010), with its share in the Ukrainian market going up 6.2 pp (to 27%) and its market share in Kazakhstan increasing 4.6 pp (to 24.4%). According to comScore, from November 2009 to November 2010, Yandex’s monthly audience has grown by 64%, peaking at over 54 million in November 2010. During the past year, Yandex localized its services for users in Belarus (yandex.by), released a search engine customized for Ukrainian users, and launched an international search service (yandex.com) alongside a number of specialized services including Yandex.Realty, Yandex.Jobs, Yandex.Music and Yandex.Amenities.

Yandex reported its achievements and highlights of 2010 in press releases published during the year.