ExchangeWire have been watching the emerging Russian market with interest. Looking to gain some insight into how things are developing, we caught up with Nikolay Danilov, Head of Display Ad Services at Yandex, to shed some light on what we can expect and look forward to in the burgeoning region.

Can you give some overview on the Yandex RTB strategy? How evolved is the Russian RTB market?

Russia's RTB market is in a very early stage compared to how it looks in Europe and the US today. Yandex was the first Russian company to launch fully-fledged RTB this year, and as the largest Russian online service hub we see our strategy and mission to be promoting RTB's benefits on a bigger scale than just pushing our in-house platform. We think RTB is able to give a second breath to display advertising in Russia as is makes inventory accessible for more advertisers.

What sort of inventory will Yandex make available in the Russian marketplace?

For RTB retargeting, we now offer seven Yandex's inventories (sections) with more than 43 million unique visitors overall (according to comScore, September 2012) plus Yandex Advertising Network inventory. It is important to emphasise we do not divide Yandex's own and partners' inventories available for RTB.

The list of Yandex-owned inventory opened for RTB includes: Dictionary, Weather, Photo, TV schedule, Services, Job, Real Estate search and Transport schedules. This inventory is available via Yandex's own DSP now, and we do not exclude it, it will be available for external DSPs in future.

Will you look to the Google strategy and aggregate this supply into one buying point like ADX?

We are looking into all strategies applied by all companies. Russia's display ads market, in its current level of development, is pretty much focused on premium inventories sales. When we realise the situation is being changed we will think on how to change our buying points.

Will you likely build out your own exchange or partner with a third parties to power the Yandex exchange?

The stack of technology used to process and support advertisements on Yandex and Yandex’s Ad Network is developed by Yandex – we use in-house technology only and our ad exchange platform is not an exclusion here. Yandex's RTB platform is built according to OpenRTB 2.0 specifications and has a number of homemade technologies.

Are many agencies setting up trading desks in the market, or is much of the demand coming from ad networks and specialists?

We feel there are a huge amount of Russian companies, including agencies and technology startups, who are trying to build their own tools, including trading desks. It is great, as different ideas from different teams encourage competition in the market, where the customer wins.

Are you ready to integrate the Yandex Exchange with DSPs and bidders? How long before will you open up to global demand?

Today Yandex is in the process of Exchange platform integration with external DSPs. Our mission is to help the market to grow as fast as it is possible to and to create an environment where all ad solution providers can develop and promote their own technologies, tools and platforms. It is extremely important now for the whole Russian digital ad market to keep it growing fast. We do not want to limit those providers by our exchange platform and we are open to partnering with any DSP, including those who are not based in Russia.