Russian government to buy YouTube clone for $15m

March 11 Mike Butcher

European News: The media division of Russian natural gas giant Gazprom - which happens to be state-owned - is to buy RuTube, a Russia-based video-sharing site based that claims 5.5 million monthly visitors, for about $15 million, according to the Russian News & Information Agency (RIA Novosti). Gazprom-Media is a large player in Russia’s media market and owns TV channels NTV and TNT, which have syndicated some of their programming on RuTube. RuTube is basically a rip-off of YouTube and competes in the video-sharing space in Russia with firms including Video@Mail.ru, Rambler Vision and the Russian version of, you guessed it, YouTube. A state-owned body doing M&A on Web 2 busineses. It’s a different market, that’s for sure.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 1:29 am and is filed under TCUK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Yujin

March 11th, 2008 at 3:21 pm

Governments having video sharing sites is not a good move for visitors and content produces. I think many users will move away from such government web sites.
Cihan Aksu

March 17th, 2008 at 1:32 am

I really can not understand why this action is for? Cant they built a video site?
Ade Kadri

March 28th, 2008 at 11:00 pm

They may just like the site ,as a matter of fact the site look very lovely
http://www.jollymates.com