OREANDA-NEWS. June 5, 2012. Media holding RBC (MICEX-RTS: RBCM) hereby announces that a leading Russian Internet portal for children and teenagers (8-14 years old) Tvidi (Tvidi.ru), which is part of the RBC group of companies, has purchased the oldest children's resource on the Russian-language Internet (Runet) – Children on Kulichki (Children.kulichki.ru). As a result of the merger, Tvidi will become the largest children's resource on Runet with a total monthly audience of over 2.5m unique users. According to the terms of the agreement, the company is not disclosing the amount of the deal.

Based on data provided by Google Analytics, the monthly audience of Tvidi.ru exceeds 1.5m unique users, and according to Rambler Top 100, the monthly audience of Children.kulichki.ru is over 1m users. Therefore, the combined audience is expected to more than double the audience of such prominent children's resources in Russia as Disney.ru (900,000 users, according to TNS) and Smeshariki.ru (770,000 users, according to Li.ru).

Oleg Ulyansky, CEO of Tvidi, commented on the deal by saying, "It just happened that the size of overlapping audiences of Tvidi and Deti on Kulichki projects is insignificant – a mere 10%. We've already launched the integration of the two websites. By the end of the year we expect the combined monthly audience of Tvidi to exceed 3m and reach the metrics demonstrated by children's cable TV channels in Russia. Meanwhile, Runet's children's audience currently stands at about 4m users, and by the year-end 75-80% of all children on the Russian Internet and more than a third of all Russian children will be using Tvidi."