Yandex acquires leading Russian movies and TV site

Leading Russian ISP Yandex has acquired Russian-language movie, TV and celebrity website KinoPoisk.

KinoPoisk has a monthly audience of 18.6 million users, according to comScore Media Metrix, and ranks as the 16th largest web property in Russia.

KinoPoisk’s users can read expert and user-generated film reviews, discover the most popular movies, watch trailers, get movie news and personalised recommendations, as well as accessing show times and tickets.

Yandex says it will develop an extended movie recommendation system tailored to users’ preferences and interests. KinoPoisk will remain available at its current domain kinopoisk.ru while the team behind the service will be smoothly integrated into the Yandex team.

Yandex, which launched a licensed music service in 2010, says it plans to deepen its relationship with rights holders and, together with KinoPoisk, will work to enhance its relationship with content creators.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“Yandex is focused on providing the most comprehensive answers to users’ questions, including by offering them relevant recommendations,” said Dmitriy Stepanov, head of media services at Yandex. “More and more often, consumers are turning to the Internet to get ideas on what movies and TV shows to watch. In order to provide high quality answers, we need to have deep knowledge of the subject matter. KinoPoisk has a huge collection of Russian-language information about films, TV shows, actors and directors, as well as users’ and experts’ reviews amassed over many years.”
“Over the years, KinoPoisk has amassed an extremely comprehensive database of film information and recommendations,” said Vitaliy Tatsiy, co-founder and general director of KinoPoisk. “Yandex’s vast resources and technological expertise will help us to bring the recommendation service to a new level, extend its capabilities much more quickly and reach more cinema fans on a wide range of devices and platforms.”