Direct Group, a Moscow-based investment company owned by French businessman Pascal Clément, has sold its two women’s sites, Passion.ru and Woman Journal (WMJ.ru), to Russian tech media group Rambler & Co.
Announced earlier this month at an industry conference in Bruges, the news was confirmed by a Rambler representative in an exchange with business daily Kommersant. The details of the transaction, however, have not been disclosed.
Woman Journal was launched by Direct Group in 2006, in an attempt to replicate the success stories of iVillage and AuFeminin in western countries. In 2010, the company joined forces with Passion.ru, a major women’s site launched as early as 1999 with a more traditional Russian inspiration. That same year, Direct Group launched Fastlane Ventures, mixing seed funding, incubation and operational involvement to develop Internet startups.
Combined together, Passion and WMJ formed a major player on their segment, approaching 10 million monthly users in their best days. However, traffic progressively fell to less than 2 million Russian users from 12 to 64 years of age in August, according to TNS.
“The acquisition of these sites will allow us to attract advertisers from the luxury and FMCG segments,” Sofia Ivanova of Rambler & Co told Kommersant.
Direct Group might have been driven to sell the sites to comply with a new Russian law which limits the stake of foreign owners in media organizations to 20%. The law comes into force on Jan. 1, 2016, but companies with a foreign ownership will have an additional year — until Feb. 1, 2017 — to comply.
Rambler & Co was formed in 2013 following the merger of two important Internet groups, Rambler-Afisha and SUP media. Controlled by Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut, the group has a number of online media outlets, including Afisha.ru, Lenta.ru and Motor.ru, as well as contextual advertising service Begun and blogging platform LiveJournal. Rambler.ru, which used to be Russia’s leading search engine in the 1990s, now positions itself as an online content and service aggregator.
This past summer Rambler & Co acquired computational linguistics software company RCO.
