Bots, coercion and low quality: how Russia is trying to replace services that have left its market - ForumDaily
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Bots, coercion and low quality: how Russia is trying to replace services that have left its market

Shortly after the start of the war between Russia and Ukraine, the Russian authorities began a massive blocking of foreign social networks and actively engaged in import substitution, reports with the BBC.

Photo: Shutterstock

News about Russian analogues regularly appear in the media, and users are forcibly driven to the forgotten Rutube, as if to pro-government rallies in Russian cities.

On the afternoon of March 14, Internet marketer Alexander Zobov reported on his VKontakte page that Instagram was completely blocked in Russia, but an alternative had already been created - the service “Rossgram“, co-founded by himself.

At that time, Russia was already waging a full-scale war in Ukraine, the State Duma introduced criminal liability for fakes about a “special military operation” and administrative liability for discrediting the Russian army, Roskomnadzor managed to block dozens of Russian and foreign media and the main social networks - Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Blocking of websites and social networks, as well as restrictions from Western companies, have virtually collapsed the Russian IT infrastructure. Bloggers lost advertising income, small and medium-sized businesses lost new clients, and Russians lost sources of information. Russian state-owned companies and random entrepreneurs have begun to create their own analogues of Western social networks and services.

“My partner Kirill Filimonov and I and a group of our developers were already prepared in advance for this outcome of events and decided not to miss the opportunity to create a Russian analogue of the social network that is popular and beloved by our compatriots,” Zobov wrote on March 14.

Then no one paid attention to this post about the new Russian service. But two days later, the story about Rossgram and little-known entrepreneurs from St. Petersburg was picked up by the media - the Russian state TV channel RT was among the first to write about it. In March, state news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti published several articles about Rossgram.

On the subject: The Russians stole tractors worth $5 million from Ukraine, but they cannot use them: the owner remotely blocked the equipment

The fact that the news about the new service went unnoticed on the first day can be explained simply - Zobov and Filimonov had a small audience on social networks and were not known in IT circles.

Both creators of the “Russian Instagram” are registered on real Instagram, but even before the application was blocked in Russia they did not use it very actively. On March 16, when the media wrote about the launch of Rossgram, Zobov’s account had 47 subscribers, Filimonov with the patriotic nickname kirillrussialand (literally - Kirill Russia land) - 60. “I love my country, Motherland, Great Russia!” — Filimonov wrote in his profile. Soon he replaced this phrase with a link to the Rossgram website.

Little was known about what Zobov and Filimonov were doing before. The only fact from Zobov’s biography that has been replicated by the media is that he studied on the same course with the founder of VKontakte and Telegram, Pavel Durov. Zobov is also a graduate of the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University.

The fact that the media latched on to this particular story does not please Zobov himself. “They spin the facts the way they want,” Zobov says disappointedly about the journalists. - Now everyone is starting to refute this, that I didn’t study at the philology department with Durov. That's funny. They can't even check this. Go to the philology department. Yes, I studied. But this does not mean that we personally know him or hold hands.”

Zobov, speaking about his professional experience, recalls that 20 years ago he created and promoted websites, and then went into marketing. In his resume on hh.ru, Zobov calls himself a marketing director and expects a salary of 160 rubles.

His partner Kirill Filimonov is an entrepreneur; he has a network of football schools in St. Petersburg. Zobov did advertising for this project last year - that’s how they met.

In April 2022, Filimonov became the owner of the company IT History LLC, registered in St. Petersburg, as follows from the SPARK-Interfax database. It is in this legal entity that the creators of Rossgram hire employees. In total, the company already employs about 50 people, 14 of them are developers, six are PR specialists.

PR ahead of launch

The application was supposed to appear in the AppStore and Google Play at the end of March. In April it became clear that the launch was being postponed. Everything that appeared on Google Play was fake, there was no need to download them, the founders of Rossgram warned.

“Starting a project, any project, from scratch is a colossal job. We are a team that works hard for you! We understand that you want magic... We are magicians, but not that much. We are realists first of all! “Creating a social network from scratch is a big, extraordinary task,” this post appeared in the Rossgram telegram channel on April 8.

At the end of April, nicknames began to be reserved in the not yet created Rossgram. Athletes, a travel blogger and several other famous people, including singer Olga Buzova, agreed to promote the project. At pre-registration, the company managed to gather 650 thousand users. By launch, they plan to reach a million “with the help of top bloggers.” Zobov said that the launch was postponed to mid-summer, but did not name the exact date. Thus, so far Rossgram’s successes look meager: there is no application yet, on the website there are only promises and an invitation to buy a nickname. It is still difficult to talk about the quality of the social network or analyze its prospects.

Kirill Filimonov was the first to invest in Rossgram, but both partners refused to say what amount they were talking about. For support, they turned to the Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF), as Zobov said. IIDF is a fund for IT startups, it was created in 2013 by the government Agency for Strategic Initiatives. The IIDF itself said that the fund is not negotiating cooperation with Rossgram, and there is no talk of entering the company’s capital.

An employee of a state-run company that does PR for regional leaders throughout Russia said that company employees began registering with Rossgram immediately after Instagram was blocked and the first news about the emergence of its “domestic alternative.”

“Rossgram is a private initiative, despite the name,” Kirill Filimonov comments on cooperation with state companies. “But we are ready to consider proposals from government agencies as well.”

How Rossgram plans to negotiate with the authorities and whether they will delete posts with the word “war”, Zobov spoke about moderation: “Naturally, we will have to do this so that we are not recognized as an extremist organization. Naturally, there will be moderation. At first there will be automatic moderation based on keywords, and then human moderation. We are currently developing this technique.”

On March 21, a Russian court recognized the activities of the American corporation Meta (it owns Facebook and Instagram) as extremist. Before that, both social networks were blocked. Since the beginning of March, the coverage of the Russian audience of Instagram has fallen by 62,5%.
In April, the creators of Rossgram began selling nicknames in an application that had not yet been created - from 10 thousand rubles.

Protracted forced transition to Rutube

On April 18, video blogger Syenduk with 7,2 million subscribers on YouTube drew attention to the comments under the latest video in his channel: several users almost at the same time began calling on Syenduk to quickly create a channel on Rutube. Bots,” Syenduk confidently concluded on Twitter.

Photo: Shutterstock

This conclusion is logical. All the comments left by the bots are usually very similar: under the video of Syenduk, users write that they and their friends have long since switched to Rutube and point out the disadvantages of YouTube (monetization ban for Russians, risk of blocking).

“And why are you still not on Rutub (you make great videos.” “I love your videos, but I’ve been switching to Rutub for the last month. Maybe you’ll start a channel there?” “Many of my friends basically stop being on YouTube! And they’ll block you it's coming soon!! why haven't you started posting videos on Rutub?" "But the next one will be in the cart or Rutub? It's time to forget YouTube: they don't pay money, they let misinformation in, they ban our people," Syenduk's commentators attacked the channel. All users those who wrote these comments are empty accounts.

Syenduk reacted angrily to the campaign involving bots. “Gazprom, people actively used your garbage platform only at the end of the 2000s to upload pirated translations of anime. Today even this is not there. For all this time, RuTube has not been able to shake itself up, and now it will not be able to, even if YouTube is blocked. RuTube is an initially failed service, it’s a shawarma stall with an upside-down McDonald’s logo, an absurd copy of a more successful project, where even the name itself gives away its essence,” Syenduk wrote.

The example of Rutube shows that the authorities were trying to carry out import substitution on the Internet long before the war. But these attempts were not very successful, despite billions in fines for Western companies, courts and constant threats of blocking.

Rutube was created by Oryol entrepreneurs in 2006. Two years later, they made a successful deal, selling the video platform to the Gazprom-Media holding for $15 million, so Rutube has always been considered a state project (today 77,6% of the shares of Gazprom-Media belong to Gazprombank). Gazprom Media has quite a lot of assets: these are the largest television channels and radio stations, video services and online media (among them - TNT, NTV, Avtoradio, Premier).

In 2016, the video service was combined with the Pladform platform (owned by Ruform LLC). At the end of 2020, GPM again became the sole owner of Rutube, purchasing 50% of the Ruform company.

The former head of Roskomnadzor Zharov has been heading the Gazprom-Media holding for the second year. Since 2021, Rutube has changed its CEO twice. In March of this year, Zharov’s deputy at Gazprom-Media, Alexander Moiseev, became the head of the service.

For a long time, Gazprom Media tried to attract an audience to Rutube through popular projects like the content of the TNT channel, which belongs to Gazprom Media - TNT projects were presented only in Rutube. In 2018, GPM stopped using Rutube as its main platform - the company began publishing premieres of its projects in Premier. But then Gazprom gave up: for example, the popular show “Dancing,” launched in August 2014, began to be posted on YouTube a year ago.

The audience in Rutube does not gather for several reasons. Most often, hosting is criticized for the lack of a view counter for videos - because of this, advertisers (and therefore bloggers) do not go to Rutube. And the obvious drawback of Rutube is that it is unlikely that an international audience will come there in the same numbers as it exists on YouTube.
“Bloggers are interested in moving to these sites when there are advertisers there. There are no advertisers on these sites, there is no way to make money on these sites,” says Vasily Derbenev, the author of the TikTok channel about the pug Leonid (1,2 million subscribers on TikTok). He calls Rutube and other Russian analogues of Western social networks “low-quality products.” “It’s all just funny, very funny,” Derbenev concludes.

The fact that there are no viewers on Rutube is also confirmed by the bloggers’ producers. In April, creative producer of YouTube projects Svetlana Gulyaeva said that she conducted an experiment with Rutube. “We uploaded the video, it was approved for a day (Rutube moderators approved it for publication), in three days we had nine views there,” Gulyaeva said on Instagram.

Rutube does not suit some of the audience due to the so-called “pre-moderation” (or censorship), which not everyone can pass. In 2021, an Open Media correspondent tried to upload a film by politician Alexei Navalny about the palace of President Vladimir Putin to Rutube, but Rutube rejected the video. It’s not a matter of copyright—Navalny’s other video about his poisoning was uploaded to Rutube.

The same person from a near-state company that does public relations for regional leaders across Russia said that Rutube had set up a fast moderation process for the company.

The authorities oblige government agencies to move to Rutube. In early April, the Russian Ministry of Education and Science sent out a letter to universities demanding that all content from YouTube be transferred to the Russian platforms VK Video and Rutube by April 4.

This large-scale transition to Rutube was started back in 2021. State universities cannot help but comply: in April, an account for the Siberian Federal University appeared on Rutube - it now has 12 subscriptions (and about a thousand on YouTube).

Even before the order of the Ministry of Education and Science, the channel was created by the Ural Federal University (8 subscribers gathered there in a month), but continued to lead the more popular one on YouTube (with 15 thousand subscribers).

Rutube is being promoted by the authorities as an alternative to the American video hosting, which they threaten to block.

Roskomnadzor has been scaring YouTube with blocking for a long time. In 2021, the court in Moscow will regularly fined for billions of rubles by Google, which owns YouTube. In April, Roskomnadzor said that YouTube was playing a leading role in the “information war waged by Western countries against Russia.”

The attempt to revive Rutube reminded the former head of the service, Yuri Degtyarev, of the film “Pet Sematary.” “In the story, a beloved cat dies and is buried. She comes back in some crooked form, they understand that something is wrong with her, and they kill her,” Degtyarev said last year.

Rutube's audience is growing, judging by the data announced by Gazprom-Media - in December 2021, the service's monthly audience almost quadrupled - to 14,2 million people. And even if you believe the company’s statistics, the Russian YouTube audience is still much higher - in January of this year, the number of Russian users exceeded 89 million people, the Mediascope company calculated. The company does not publish statistics on Rutube - these measurements are currently closed.

Political views of bloggers from Yappy

Under Zharov, Gazprom Media launched another social network, which in concept is similar to the Chinese TikTok. The social network “for starting a blogging career” was called Yappy. It was created on the basis of the “I’m Well Done” mobile application, which Gazprom Media acquired at the end of 2020.

The face of Yappy was made by actress Anna Khilkevich, who for a long time played one of the main roles in the series “Univer” on TNT. This became known to the general public in December 2021 - the girl appeared at a press conference by Vladimir Putin.

“How do you feel about interacting with young people in such environments or do you think that the generation is deteriorating?” — Khilkevich unexpectedly asked Putin after a prepared short presentation of Yappy. “Why is it degrading?” - Putin laughed, adding that humanity is always developing, and children are better and smarter than their parents.

Yappy is managed by the company "Rhythm Media", which is part of Gazprom Media. Both GPM projects - Rutube and Yappy - are exclusively implemented through one agency - Insight People, said the director of one of the Moscow advertising agencies (he asked for anonymity). In 2021, the Insight People agency entered into contracts with tiktokers to create content for Yappy, wrote the publication “Important Stories” (the Ministry of Justice included the publication in the register of undesirable organizations).
Bloggers on Yappy and Rutube are offered from $700 to $2 - the amount depends on the number of subscribers on Instagram, as the director of one of the Moscow advertising agencies says. The interlocutor clarified that before Instagram was blocked, the “average blogger” earned more on Yappy - up to $000. For this money, bloggers must create at least 5500 videos per month, interact with subscribers and promote the launch of Yappy on their social networks.

The contract even specifies how this should be done. They are similar to those used by hockey player Nikita Feoktistov, who spoke about Rossgram, and the bots agitating Syenduk to move to Rutube: “Yappy is now in closed access. Only a limited group of bloggers are connected. A very cozy and flamboyant get-together,” “It seems like I’ll be here for a long time. The platform is not perfect yet, but the theme is cool. Soon she will be brought to “mind” and she will be “fire”.

Insight People also enters into long-term contracts with bloggers for five years. The blogger, under the terms of such cooperation, receives 30% of advertising income, and the agency - 70%.

“The bloggers who advertise Rutube, Yappy and all these Instagrams do not take it seriously, they do it because there is no money - many came to Moscow and they simply have nothing to live on,” says Dmitry Yusupov, head of the YusMedia Agency. The current situation is a good opportunity for Insight People to attract and capture bloggers in the market, he adds.

From the SPARK-Interfax database it follows that the general director of Insight People LLC is Alina Zinnatullina. In the GetСontact application, which shows how the phone number is recorded with other users, Zinnatulina is defined as “Alina bloggers”, “Alina Insight People Boss”, “Alina Tik Tok Moscow”, “Alina Zinnatulina Yappi” and “Sponsorgazpromezhdenelno”.

Insight People LLC was created in March last year. In 2021, the company's revenue exceeded $42 million. During this time, many regional branches of VGTRK shot stories about the agency - in Orel, Bryansk, Tver, Stravropol, they even had a joint project with the regional branch of United Russia in Tatarstan.

In the questionnaire for bloggers selected by Insight People, the agency asks to indicate, among other things, their political views.

It is not difficult to guess which views are close to the producers. The agency on Instagram is proud of its patriotic projects - Insight People residents starred in videos for Flag Day and National Unity Day. And general producer Ilya Ivlev reports on his website that the agency “implements patriotic projects that receive millions of views.” At the same time, the agreement for bloggers stipulates that the content should not contain jokes or questions on political topics.

Yappy was launched before the war, at the end of 2021. The social network became more relevant after TikTok partially left Russia. This also happened against the backdrop of Russia’s war in Ukraine, but it was not the Russian authorities who blocked the Chinese application—TikTok itself decided to temporarily prohibit users in Russia from uploading new videos and conducting live broadcasts. The reason is the law on fakes about the Russian army (it provides for criminal liability).

“Temporarily unemployed” from VK

There is another agency in the advertising market that acts as an intermediary between large companies and bloggers. The Invite agency works with “premium” advertising and collaborates with more popular bloggers than those selected by Insight People, as the director of the Moscow advertising agency said.

VK has started working with Invite, a source familiar with the situation at VK confirmed. This happened shortly after control of the company was shared by Sogaz and Gazprombank (the companies each have 45% of the shares of MF Technologies JSC, which controls 57,3% of the voting shares of VK). VK now has a partnerships department; it works with media, bloggers and communities. The revenue of Invite LLC in 2021 exceeded $2 million (in 2020 it was only $2), as follows from the SPARK-Interfax database.

Before restrictions on TikTok, Invite bloggers participated in an advertising campaign for the Moscow metro - they recorded TikToks about the new stations of the Big Circle Line with the tracks “Mom in the Metro” and “Zyuzino”, which they wrote specifically for PR of the BKL (this was a project of the Moscow government).

In the film about bloggers “Temporarily Unemployed” by Natasha Gasankhanova (she also works with the Invite agency), Vkontakte is promoted as a platform that compensates for the losses of bloggers associated with restrictions on monetization on YouTube.
“Invite bloggers don’t lose money,” says Invite operating director Oleg Fedushchak in this film, commenting on the crisis in the advertising market. - YouTubers will definitely be able to count on the same income from VK to replace YouTube - I assume it’s even more. VK will break out because it is multi-format.”

VKontakte (part of VK) was created by Pavel Durov in 2006. In the fall of 2021, VK presented its new project VK Video - the company combined the resources of VKontakte and another Russian social network Odnoklassniki. The company claims that the daily audience of VK Video is 40 million people.

The founder of the advertising agency Wildjam and producer of the TikTok house Dream Team House, Yaroslav Andreev, believes that the flourishing of Vkontakte is possible because there are now no alternatives. “If, for example, we abandon all transport, planes, trains and cars, will horse-drawn transport develop? Well, it probably will. Will it be able to completely cover all the tasks you need? He can’t,” says Andreev.

Sanctions-resistant, but unsafe “Our Store”

In April, the creators of the Russian application store NashStore explained why there had been no news from them for a long time - in a VKontakte post they posted a Soviet poster with the phrase “The plan is clear. Get to work quickly! The Motherland ordered it to be built.”

The authorities began promoting NashStore (or “our store” in Russian) in March as an alternative to Google Play, from which many Russian applications have already been removed, including those of the largest banks that fell under blocking Western sanctions (for example, Sberbank and Alfa Bank ").

This is done in case the authorities decide to slow down or block YouTube. You can slow down YouTube by obliging providers to disable Global Google Cash (Google servers that are installed by telecom operators), says Mikhail Klimarev, director of the Internet Protection Society.

This is not being done yet, because the slowdown of YouTube will lead not only to the breakdown of the Google ecosystem in Russia, but also to the slowdown of other sites and, as a result, to critical problems in the country's economy. Approximately the same situation was in Belarus and Kazakhstan, when the authorities began to turn off the traffic, and everything stopped working altogether, as Klimarev recalls.

The autonomous non-profit organization Digital Platforms was the first to talk about NashStore. Its head is Arseny Shcheltsin, who previously worked at the Internet Development Institute, which is headed by the former deputy head of the presidential administration’s department for public projects, Alexei Goreslavsky. Shcheltsin is also a member of the IT Council under the State Duma, according to the Digital Platforms website (presumably, this refers to the Council under the State Duma Committee on Information Policy).

“Russians can no longer normally use Google Play to purchase and pay for applications, and developers have lost their source of income,” this is how Vladimir Zykov, a representative of the Digital Platforms ANO, explained the motivation of the NashStore creators. He believes that Russia has found itself “in the grip of severe pressure from Western companies.”

Zykov, in addition to his activities in Digital Platforms, heads an organization with the complex name “Association of Professional Users of Social Networks and Messengers.” In 2020, members of this association called on the Ministry of Digital Development to fine Western social networks for censoring Russian media.

“An alternative, independent, sanctions-resistant application store for Android,” these are the definitions chosen by its creators for NashStore.

It is still difficult to say in what form NashStore will be presented to the Russians, but there are two most likely options. The store may be included in the list of programs that must be pre-installed on smartphones. The law on the pre-installation of Russian software was adopted in 2019. It obliges electronics manufacturers (Apple, Samsung, etc.) to install Russian software on their gadgets intended for sale in Russia.

The second option is to download the store through the Android Package Kit (a downloadable file format consisting of Android application codes). This option is more difficult for users and, in addition, users will have to reduce the level of protection of their gadget to install applications that have not been verified by Google, explains Klimarev from the Internet Defense Society.

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He warns that this store, like other Russian analogues of blocked Western applications, may be unsafe to use also because the personal data of their users is not protected: “These companies have servers in Russia, employees in Russia. They will not be able to resist and will hand over personal data to the authorities.”

In April, a general chat consisting of bloggers who agreed to work with Yappy received a message that they would receive documents for April with a delay. “The delay is due to technical difficulties that have arisen due to the situation in the world,” agency representatives explained, likely referring to the war in Ukraine and Western sanctions that have hit Russia.

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