(Interview) The Background, Foreground and Future of LiveJournal in Russia

By Brice Dunwoodie (@cmswire) Dec 6, 2007

CMSWire had a chance to speak with the Russian media company who just acquired LiveJournal from San Francisco-based Six Apart.

Edward Shenderovich is the Director of Strategy for Moscow-based SUP (pronounced “soup” in English). Edward comes from a recent history with Web CMS vendor Quantum Art, and from social networking project Dandelife.

Today he walks through the recent history of the SUP / Six Apart partnership, the future of LiveJournal, and discusses some of the controversy which has been bubbling in the blogosphere ever since SUP first partnered with Six Apart.

Background on SUP and the Deal

CMSWire: On the SUP website, you're listed as the Director of Strategy. You've been around since the beginning. Tell us a little about SUP, its history, and its focus?

Edward Shenderovich: Ok, SUP was founded in 2006. We're a global media company, headquartered in Moscow. We received Russian seed capital. We have global ambitions and our acquisition of LiveJournal seems to be the right step along this way.

CMSWire: Generally speaking it appears that SUP is in the business of acquiring media properties, acquiring delivery capabilities for advertising, and then monetizing these properties. Is that an accurate summary?

ES: We're interested in exploring different opportunities in the social networking space, in the social media space, and in traditional online media (if one can say that). And we want to explore different monetization strategies, through advertising and other means.

This has been demonstrated by our current setup, where the company consists of four different companies right now — LiveJournal, Championat.ru - the sports news site, +SOL - the media sales house, and Victory S.A. - an interactive media agency.

CMSWire: There's been some speculation that SUP will now pursue an online portal strategy — like a Yahoo! for the Russian market. Is this in the cards?

ES: No. No. Well, we have no definite plans for doing that. Right now, we're really a media holding company and ultimately these services may be tied together — for example LiveJournal and Championat have some tie-ins in Russia — but that is not part of our primary strategy right now.

CMSWire: Announced publicly was SUP's acquisition of LiveJournal. LiveJournal has had quite a successful history in Russia and SUP took over LiveJournal Cyrillic operations via a partnership with Six Apart in late 2006. Can you fill us in a little more on the background of the acquisition deal?

ES: Yes, so we entered a licensing partnership with Six Apart in late 2006, and provided support and marketing for LiveJournal users in Russia and for the Cyrillic segment. So all the Russian speaking users worldwide. During the past year we worked closely with Six Apart and it seemed to be a very successful partnership.

We doubled the number of registered users from around 600,000 to 1.2 mil, and unlike most blogging platforms, most of these users were live (active). The monthly audience of viewers is now about 8.1 mil uniques (Oct 2007), which is about double from 2006 — we don't have precise numbers from Six Apart from 2006.

CMSWire: So throughout this past year, SUP has been heavily involved in support and marketing activities, but have they actually been running the IT infrastructure operations, or is that something that is just changing now?

ES: We have run the infrastructure operations on the Russian side and we have been delivering a number of services to Russian users, but we were not involved in the infrastructure operations of the hundreds of servers that are running LiveJournal.