VK (social networking website)

VK
Web address	www.vk.com
Type of site	Social Networks
Registration	Required
Available in	76 languages
Users	290+ million[1]
Owner	Mail.Ru Group
Created by	Pavel Durov
Launched	10 October 2006
Revenue	rp 121,4 million (2013)[2]
Alexa rank	38 (March 2015)[3]
Current status	Active

VK (originally VKontakte, Russian: ВКонтакте, literally "in touch") is the largest Russian social network in Europe.^[4] It is available in several languages, but is especially popular among Russian-speaking users, particularly in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Like other social networks, VK allows users to message each other publicly or privately, to create groups, public pages and events, share and tag images, audio and video, and to play browser-based games.^[5]

As of November 2014, VK had at least 280 million accounts.^[6] VK is ranked 22 (as of November 1, 2014)^[7] in Alexa's global Top 500 sites and is the second most visited website in Russia, after Yandex.^[8] According to eBizMBA Rank, it is the 8th most popular social networking site in the world.^[9] As of January 2015, VK had an average of 70 million daily users.^[10] In 2013, the Mirilashvili family sold its 40% share in VK to United Capital Partners for $1.12 billion,^[11] while Lev Leviev sold his 8% share in the same deal, giving United Capital Partners 48% ownership. In January 2014, VK's founder Pavel Durov sold his 12% stake in the company to the CEO of Megafon, which is controlled by Alisher Usmanov. Following the deal, Usmanov and his allies controlled around 52% of the company.^[12] Shortly thereafter, the CEO of Megafon, sold his 12% stake to Mail.ru, thus allowing mail.ru to consolidate its controlling stake of 52% in VK.^[13]

On September 16, 2014, the Mail.ru group bought the remaining 48% stake of VK from Blesmir Development and Palagon, thus becoming the sole proprietor of the social network.^[14]

History

Founder Pavel Durov launched VKontakte for beta testing in September 2006, having just graduated from St Petersburg State University. The following month, the domain name vkontakte.ru was registered. User registration was initially limited to within university circles exclusively by invitation, but the site still grew quickly. In February 2007 the site reached a user base of over 100,000 and was recognized as the second largest player in Russia's nascent social network market. In the same month, the site was subjected to a severe DDoS attack, which briefly put it offline. The user base reached 1 million in July 2007, and 10 million in April 2008. In December 2008 VK overtook rival Odnoklassniki as Russia's most popular social networking service.

Company

VKontakte was incorporated on 19 January 2007 as a Russian limited liability company. Founder and CEO Pavel Durov owned 20% of shares (although he had majority voting power through proxy votes), and a trio of Russian investors, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili ( Mikhael Mirilashvili's son) and Lev Leviev,^[15] owned 60%, 10% and 10% respectively.^[16] The original founders then sold a stake of 39.99% to Mail.ru Group (formerly Digital Sky Technologies).^[17][18]

On 29 May 2012 Mail.ru Group announced that it has decided to yield control of the company to Durov by offering him the voting rights on its shares. Combined with Durov's personal 12% stake, this gave him 52% of the votes.^[19][20] In April 2013, United Capital Partners bought 48% of VK shares from Vyacheslav Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev for $1.12 billion.^[21] In 2014 Pavel Durov sold his 12% stake to Ivan Tavrin, the CEO of Russian mobile phone operator Megafon.^[22]

In April 2014 Durov stated he had sold his stake in the company after "coming under increasing pressure" from the Russian Federal Security Service to hand over personal details of users who were members of a VK group dedicated to the Euromaidan protest movement.^[23]

VK canceled their IPO plans, citing unsatisfactory market conditions after Facebook's IPO blunder.^[20][24]

Website

Functionality

As with most social networks, the site's core functionality is based around private messaging and sharing photos, status updates and links with friends. VK also has tools for managing online communities and celebrity pages. The site allows its users to upload, search and stream media content, such as videos and music. VK features an advanced search engine, that allows complex queries for finding friends, as well as a real-time news search.

• Messaging. VK Private Messages can be exchanged between groups of 2 to 30 people. An email address can also be specified as the recipient. Each message may contain up to 10 attachments: Photos, Videos, Audio Files, Maps (an embedded map with a manually placed marker) and Documents.^[25]
• News. VK users can post on their profile walls, each post may contain up to 10 attachments – media files, maps and documents (see above). User mentions and hashtags are supported. In case of multiple photo-attachments the previews are automatically scaled and arranged in a magazine-style layout. The news feed can be switched between all news (default) and most interesting modes. The site features a news-recommendation engine, global real-time search and individual search for posts and comments on specific users' walls.
• Communities. VK features two types of communities. Groups are better suited for decentralised communities (discussion-boards, wiki-style articles, editable by all members etc.). Public pages are a news feed oriented broadcasting tool for celebrities and businesses. The two types are largely interchangeable, the main difference being in the default settings.
• Like buttons. VK like buttons for posts, comments, media and external sites operate in a different way from Facebook. Liked content doesn't get automatically pushed to the user's wall, but is saved in the (private) Favorites section instead. The user has to press a second 'share with friends' button to share an item on their wall or send it via private message to a friend.
• Privacy. Users can control the availability of their content within the network and on the Internet. Blanket and granular privacy settings are available for pages and individual content.
• Synchronization with other social networks. Any news published on the VK wall, will appear on Facebook or Twitter. Certain news may not published by clicking on the logo next to the button "Send". Editing post in VK does not change the post in Facebook or Twitter, and vice versa. But removing the news in the VK will remove it from other social networks.
• SMS serves. Russian users can receive and reply to a private messages or leave a comments for community news using SMS.

Languages

As of October 2012 the site features 3 official languages (English, Russian and Ukrainian) as well unofficial user-generated translations into 70 more languages. Advertisements are only shown in the Russian and Ukrainian versions.

• Russian-speaking users can choose between the standard Russian version and two extras: a Soviet version and a Pre-Revolutionary version. Other than language tweaks (e.g. telegrams for messages and comrades for friends) these versions contain other easter eggs. For example, all private messages in the Soviet version have a stamp saying 'passed server censorship'. The pre-revolutionary version uses old-style Russian orthography. Both extra versions are also ad-free.

Issues

Copyright issues

Litigation

In 2008 the leading Russian television channel RTR sued VKontakte (then VK) over unlicensed copies of two of its films, uploaded by VK users. In 2010 this dispute was settled by the Russian Supreme Arbitration Court in favor of the social network. The court ruled that VK is not responsible for its users’ copyright violations, taking into account that both parties agreed with the technical possibility to identify the user who posted illegal content and who, consequently, must incur the liability.^[26] Another ruling early in 2012 went partially in favor of Gala Records (now Warner Music Russia), a recording studio, when the same court ordered VK to pay $7000 for not being active enough in regard to copyrighted materials.^[27]

Efforts against copyright infringement

VK is DMCA-compliant and offers a content removal tool for copyright holders.^[28] Large-scale copyright holders may gain access to bulk content removal tools.^[29]

Since 2010 VK has also entered several partnerships with legal content providers, such as television networks^[30] and streaming providers.^[31] Most notably, the Video on Demand provider IVI.ru, that has secured licensing rights with all of Hollywood majors in 2012.^[32] These partnerships allow providers to remove user-uploaded content from VK and substitute it with legal embedded copies from the provider's site.^[33] This legal content can be either ad-sponsored, subscription based or free, depending on the provider's choices. VK does not display its own advertising in the site's music or video sections, nor in the videos themselves. On October 2013, VKontakte was cleared of copyright infringement charges by a court in Saint Petersburg. The judge ruled that the social network is not responsible for the content uploaded by its users.^[34]

On the November, 2014 the head of The Federal service for supervision of communications, information technology and mass media Maxim Ksenzov said that “Vkontakte” will complete the process of legalization of the content at the beginning of 2015. At that moment (November, 2014) negotiations between major labels companies and the social network “Vkontakte” are going.^[35]

DDoS attacks on sites

Because the social network is the one most popular and highloaded sites in runet its visits can be used to make DDoS attacks on smaller sites. VK performed DDOS attacks on certain sites, making user's browser send multiple requests to the target site without user's consent. The targets were Runet Prize voting page in 2008^[36] and CAPTCHA-solving service antigate.com in 2012.^[37][38] This was done inserting an iframe and a piece of JavaScript code which periodically reloaded the iframe. As a countermeasure antigate was detecting wheither iframe was loaded from vk and if it were antigate had redirected request to xHamster, a well-known porn site, so vk had to stop the attack because the site is widely used by children. VK tried to use XMLHttpRequest to solve this problem, but had forgotten about same-origin policy. Then they have stopped the attack though there were many ways to solve the problem with redirect.

Promotional use by bands and musicians

Musicians that use VK for promotion often upload their own tracks to their official VK pages. Notable examples include the international celebrities like Tiësto,^[39] Shakira,^[40] Paul Van Dyk,^[41] The Prodigy^[42] or Dan Balan.^[43][44]

Blacklisted

On May 24, 2013, it was reported in the media that the site had been mistakenly put on a list of websites banned by the Russian government.^[45]

Some critics have accused the blacklist of being simply the latest in a series of suspicious incidents to have happened to the website in recent months, as the Russian government look to increase their stake in, and control of the site.^[46]

Italian controversy

On November 18, 2013, following an order from the Court of Rome, VK was blocked in Italy after a complaint from Medusa Film stating that VK was hosting an illegal copy of one of its films.^[47] However, as of April 2015, the site has been reopened for Italian users and its mobile app is available on both App Store and Google Play.

Founder Pavel Durov dismissal

Founder Pavel Durov was dismissed as CEO in April 2014 after he had failed to retract a (according to himself) prank April fools letter of resignation.^[23] Durov then claimed the company had been effectively taken over by Vladimir Putin allies,^[23][48][49] and suggested his ousting was the result of his refusal to hand over personal details of users to the Russian Federal Security Service and his refusal to shut down a VK group dedicated to anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny.^[23][49]

In the media

On Gawker, Adrien Chen wrote an article about the growing popularity of Vkontakte among American men to try to find Russian girls.^[50]

Popularity

According to Alexa Internet ranking, VK is one of the most visited websites in the post-Soviet countries. It holds:

• 1st position in Belarus^[51]
• 2nd in Russia^[52] and Ukraine^[53]
• 3rd in Kazakhstan^[54]

Profile privacy policy

After submitting profile deletion, a user must wait 210 days to complete submission.

Criticism

VK disappeared from App Store due to adult content on their pages.^[55] It's quite popular among minors 14+ age,^[56] but still contains a lot of video, groups, images inappropriate for children.^[57]

See also

• Ambient awareness
• Cyberstalking
• Cyworld
• Facebook
• Internet in Russia
• Myspace
• Six degrees of separation
• List of social networking websites
• List of virtual communities with more than 100 million active users

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Vkontakte.

• Official website
• Vkontakte loses its founder
• VKontakte Hungarian blog

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