Declining interests - or just too many shows?

Eric Helque

Online business news agency RosBusinessConsulting (RBC) recast itself into a holding company: RosBusinessConsulting Holding. Although it may appear as only one more among many, it is unusual in several ways.

First, it is purely Russian and has no foreign investors, contrary to many others in the Russian market, such as Rambler, ru-net Holdings and Netbridge. In fact, said RosBusinessConsulting's general director, Yury Robinsky, RBC's shareholders are all company managers, something that is also not common in the Russian Internet.

The holding will include the RosBusinessConsulting Website itself, www.rbc.ru, which sells news; also other sites it developed. such as www.sport.rbc.ru or www.job.rbc.ru. In addition to this, it will have Websites that the new holding just bought, such as www.relax.ru, devoted to leisure and free time; and www.hotbox.ru, a free e-mail service.

The type of content that these new Websites have is a depar-ture from traditional RBC activities, i.e. providing news. But, Robnisky said, this is precisely why RBC bought them and became a holding: The word here is "diversification."

"The rbc.ru site that was launched eight years ago focused on the business elite --- a group ready to pay to get access to business news," he said. "We fully reached our target. But now, we cannot expect to increase the number of our visitors on this segment much more. Having entirely different kind of sites as well, targeted at very different types of users, is the only way we can expand."

But having so many different Websites under one roof could be ñînfusing for users. That's why RBC will no get them all into a giant portal, as it might have done. "With the new Websites we acquired, we are going to have several very different user profiler, so putting all our sites together I probably not a good idea," Robinsky said.

RBC's turnover for 2000 should be $8 million, Robinsky said. Although the new Websites will draw their revenues only from advertising, which may be à bit of a challenge, he said he hopes RBC's 2001 turnover will be three times as large.