Type of business Private Available in Russian Owner Gazprom-Media Founded 2006 | Type of site Video hosting service Area served Russia, CIS, Worldwide Headquarters Moscow, Russia | |
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Key people Yelena Sakharova (CEO), Alexander Dunaevskiy (Deputy Director General, Strategic Development) CEO Yelena Sakharova (Jul 2012–) Founders Mikhail Paulkin, Oleg Volobuev Profiles | ||
Rutube is a web video streaming service targeted at Russian speakers. The web site includes videos created by private individuals and licensed programming from entertainment companies that are hosted directly on Rutube, and videos that have been viewed on Facebook. As of April 2012, just under 14.5 million unique users per month viewed video clips hosted on Rutube (from a subset of Russian users aged 12–54). Rutube's overall monthly global traffic, as reported by representatives from Rutube, consists of 30 million unique visitors who viewed over 168 million video clips.
Contents
Unregistered users on Rutube, can view, share, and search for videos. Registered users via Facebook can perform additional functions such as discovering videos their friends have watched on Facebook, uploading videos, commenting, and liking videos.
History
Rutube was founded in 2006 by Oleg Volobuev and Mikhail Paukin, both from the Russian city of Oryol. In November 2008, the video portal was acquired by Gazprom Media Holdings. The acquisition price was not revealed, however in March 2009 experts valued the video portal at $15 million. After the purchase, Rutube’s management was replaced, and a new CEO, Mihail Ilyichev was appointed. Previously Ilyichev was the director of the management department for television stations owned and operated by the Russian television network TNT. The Rutube office was relocated to Moscow.
Owner
Media holding "Gazprom-Media".