vKontakte, the Russian clone of Facebook, recently went international by translating the site into 22 languages. The only challenge now is for the company to get the same sort of international brand recognition that Facebook has obtained. With Facebook’s current dominance it is unlikely that vKontakte will get the same type of recognition, however that’s not stopping them from trying. The latest campaign I’ve seen took place in the comments of our blog.
The comment which was recently posted on one of our news articles read as follows:
Hello, my name is Daria. I work and live in Moscow/Russia. Thing I like doing most are traveling and dancing. Maybe I’m going to your city) People describe me as joyful, kind and feminine. You can find me on FREE Russian social network HERE. Write me a message to find out more.
Sincerely, Daria Popova!http://meet.dipdns.ru/
http://img48.imageshack.us/img48/9405/girlm.jpg
The URLs posted above each redirect to the English version of the site, found at VK.com. The homepage of the site counts the number of members, which is currently at around 45.9 million. The number however is little more than a rough approximation which updates at random intervals. For those of you that are programmers, the javascript used to calculate “the number of registered users” is as follows:
var memCount = 45911657;
var memPerSec = 2.41764248695;
function updateCount() {
next = -(1000 / memPerSec)*Math.log(Math.random());
memCountString = '' + memCount;
len = memCountString.length;
memCountString = memCountString.substr(0,len-6)+" "+memCountString.substr(len-6,3)+" "+memCountString.substr(len-3,3);
ge('memCount').innerHTML = memCountString;
memCount = memCount + 1;
setTimeout(updateCount, next);
}
addEvent(window, 'load', updateCount);
While the code isn’t really relevant to their new spam campaign, it was a random fun fact that I found while looking at the VK.com homepage. So what about the company’s spam campaign? It’s not limited to our blog. I did a quick search on Google blogsearch and found hundreds of articles over the past few days which have since been deleted. All of the articles had identical content. One forum thread which had not yet been deleted read:
Hi, guys! I very need you help.
There is one competition in social network (most popular in Russia). The winner will be human, who invite most people from west countries (and I guess all countries but Russia).
You should to register there, using ONLY THIS LINK: http://vk.com/reg9260608 and activate you account by SMS.
It’s not hard, but I have to win this game. PLEASE, ASK ABOUT IT ALL FRIENDS, AND ALL YOU KNOW, WHO USING INTERNET. I have to invite more people than all the rest
Please, guys.
Thanks.
Apparently the company’s expansion plan is to reward users that are most successful at recruiting Westerners! Just a few weeks ago Techcrunch wrote about the company’s international expansion plans. While I’m not sure of what reward the company is offering users, it appears that the best model to win the competition is through spamming the hell out of users.
The irony behind all of this is that the same people who just purchased around $300 million in Facebook stock are also large shareholders in VK.com. I’m not surprised to see them purchasing as much Facebook stock as possible though since Facebook should eventually dominate VK on all metrics. While there is just over half a million Facebook users in Russia, that number is up from 120,000 users back in December of 2008.
My advice to VK.com: if you’re going to make a last ditch effort, you should try making it without bombarding the internet with spam. You aren’t going to win any loyal users that way.
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apparently they didn't get a good translator….
Comment by Jason Beckerman — October 15, 2009 @ 12:49 pm
Is all this post based on one comment posted on your blog?
Comment by David Haddad — October 15, 2009 @ 2:35 pm
@David,
It started with the comment but then I searched and found a bunch of other stuff over the past few days. Did you read the part about Google blogsearch?
Comment by Nick ONeill — October 15, 2009 @ 5:24 pm
Hi from Russia! I have some comments to your post, here they are:
1. "While I’m not sure of what reward the company is offering users"
Vkontakte offers 500 8Gb Apple iPod's Nano for users who bring more foreigners. Vkontakte's main target is Eastern Europe now, but I'm sure that they are planning to spread everywhere.
2. This member counter really shows the number of registered users, and the script is used in order to reduce amount of requests to the database server. Two variables on the top are refreshing sometimes from the database to reflect the real number of users and growth rate. But to be honest, at least 1/3 of the 45 million accounts are fake and used for spam and Vkontakte’s internal content promotion. Last month, Vkontakte started to use mobile verification for the new registrations, but spam is still a great problem.
to Jason Beckerman: “apparently they didn’t get a good translator….”
Couple of weeks ago I tried to switch my Facebook account to Russian and I realized that it is translated absolutely terrible. It’s not just about missing some grammar, but sometimes it’s impossible to understand what does some sentences mean. Maybe that is the reason why Facebook is not so popular in Russia.
P.S.: I’m sorry for my English. Hope you could understand me
P.P.S.: Feel free to ask about Vkontakte, I use it everyday for 2,5 years.
Comment by Dmitry Bykovskikh — October 16, 2009 @ 10:51 am
Dmitry –
Ive been trying to sign up for vkontakte and the ask for code from sms i give them my phone number but never recieve the code do you know what i can do?
Comment by Mark — March 2, 2010 @ 10:07 am
It succed for me when I gave them my phone number.. remembered land code and so?
Actually I think VK has some features that are missing in facebook and the other way around.. but I finds VK much better:P
Started using since I were in russia for two weeks and wanted to stay in contact with all the great people I meet.. and VK is doing the work
hehe
Comment by Theis — September 14, 2010 @ 10:32 am
I like this shit)))
Comment by SERGI — February 18, 2011 @ 2:17 am
Our company has 2 years offers all kinds of SMO in the Russian market. Making promotion groups, questionnaires, pages, and communities in social media networks. Recently, among our clients become a fitness club of world famous brand FitCurves and mineral water Borjomi – One team.
Comment by Five Grand — February 24, 2011 @ 9:12 am
VK is much better than Facebook, it has no sponsor on the page, the navigation is easy, clean and fast. You can find any song you want in real time, you can find any person you want…and have always the same layout with no changes through the years. I live in Italy, unfortunately it's very hard to compete with facebook.
is a real shame.
http://www.vk.com
Comment by Gennaro — October 18, 2011 @ 10:31 am
Eu comecei a usar o VK atualmente!
Muito melhor que o facebook, principalmente para ver filmes
Comment by Daniel Tornesi — October 18, 2011 @ 10:50 am