Business with China: New Reality after Blocking Yandex and VK in Ukraine

Ukrainian President Petr Poroshenko has expanded the list of sanctions against individuals and legal entities from Russia. To be more specific, Ukraine imposed sanctions on several Russian online companies, including Yandex, which is Russia’s biggest IT company, as well as some other popular web services like VK, Odnoklassniki, and Mail.ru Group. According to the presidential decree, Ukrainian Internet providers are forbidden to grant access to those blacklisted websites.

At the same time, the Ukrainian president expanded the list of Russian individuals who are banned from visiting Ukraine. The list now includes over 1200 citizens of the Russian Federation and it has to do with annexing the Crimea and supporting the Donbass separatists.

Business in Social Networks: Impact and Figures

Promodo has conducted a survey among several Ukrainian companies to figure out that 77% of them used Russian online advertising services to some extent:

- 68% used Yandex.Direct

- 40% used VK’s advertising offers

As expected, since the degree took effect, over 50% of the Ukrainian businesses have moved to Facebook and Google for advertising purposes.

Kirill Kaftanyk: Now that VK and Yandex are blacklisted, it’s time to go to China

Kirill Kaftanyk, Founder ofSONMAX Company, told Market Leader how to stay afloat in the online marketing environment after VK and Yandex were blacklisted:

It’s not a secret that then news about blocking Russian websites disappointed both average users and businessmen in Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of users who used to make money through Russian social networks and used to build their online businesses using Russian websites have now found themselves jobless. On my own part, I can tell that those events haven’t affected my business. The thing is that China has always been open for cooperation, and there is a whole lot of people out there. The key goal is to get distracted from the bad news and instead focus on something newer and more reliable. If you are ready for this kind of changes, we are here to help you out.