Begun

» see begun.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Begun started in 2002 and was the first thing of its kind in the Russian-speaking internet: keyword-matched text ads, sold by auction, served onto other people's pages. Yandex.Direct had launched a year earlier on the search side. Begun's contribution was the network, the idea that a site with a hundred visitors a day could be a place where advertising happened.

Its founders are worth naming precisely because of what they did afterward. Alexey Basov ran the business. The other one was Andrey Andreev, born Andrey Ogandzhanyants in Moscow in 1974, who had built SpyLog in 1999 and would go on to build Mamba and then Badoo. SpyLog has a grave on this site. The same person built the counter that measured the Russian web, then the network that monetized it, then the dating app that made him a billionaire, in that order, and only the last one is remembered outside Russia.

The hundred-visitors threshold was the product. Any site on paid hosting clearing that number could join, which meant Begun became the default way a Russian-language hobby page turned into a few rubles. More than fifty thousand ad-carrying properties were in the system at once, and the media-partner list went up to Mail.ru, Rambler, Google, LiveJournal and Odnoklassniki, over 150,000 sites in total. The dealer network ran to more than 2,500 agencies across sixteen countries, as far out as China and South Africa. TNS measured the network at 27 million people a month and about 12 million a day in May 2011.

I never earned a ruble from it, and the only thing keeping me out was the alphabet. Anyone who put a page online in the 2000s learned what a per-click payout was, and on the Turkish forums where I posted my hardware list in a signature the same arithmetic was running in a different currency. Begun was the same product wearing Cyrillic.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the deal the state refused ~

In 2008 Google agreed to buy Begun from Rambler Media for $140 million. The deal handed Google a real position in the one large search market where it was losing, and the timing put it months ahead of Yandex's planned IPO. The Federal Antimonopoly Service refused to clear it, reasoning that the combination could account for up to 86 percent of the Russian contextual advertising market.

Read the number again. The regulator's own case for blocking the sale was that Begun plus Google would be most of the market, which is a statement about how big Begun was in 2008. It held about 19.5 percent of Russian contextual advertising, second behind Yandex.Direct's 45 percent. That was the high point, and it was also the last moment anyone was willing to pay a large sum for the company.

~ passed around ~

What followed was ten years of being restructured by its owner. In January 2010 Begun became an authorized Google AdWords reseller in Russia, selling the ads of the company that had been forbidden from buying it. In June 2011, when Rambler switched its own search over to Yandex technology, Begun became a reseller of Yandex.Direct too, and briefly had the odd distinction of being the only service that could push a campaign onto every major Runet search engine at once.

Rambler bought out the remaining stake in 2012 and promised up to $8 million of investment. In spring 2013 Begun was merged with the price-comparison site Price.ru, and that September the whole advertising platform was replaced with a new one called Begun.Smart. There were geotargeted ads built on AlterGeo's location data, video formats, mobile formats. None of it moved the share. By then advertisers had a straightforward reason to use Yandex instead, which was that their customers were already there.

~ the money stopped first ~

The end is documented in the comment threads rather than in any announcement. From the end of 2015 webmasters could no longer withdraw what they had earned. The company's social accounts went silent after March 2016. Demands for payment kept appearing on forums and review sites through to the end of 2019, long after there was anyone left to read them.

The site itself froze in 2018 and is only reachable through the Internet Archive now. Rambler sold Price.ru to S8 Capital in November 2018, and today typing begun.ru into a browser lands you on price.ru, a shopping comparison service with no connection to advertising at all. Russia's first ad network ended as a redirect into the merger partner that was supposed to save it, with a tail of unpaid small publishers behind it.

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