The Ukrainian Banner Network (UBN) was born in the late 1990s, when Alexey Mas and Ruslan Dmitrakovich decided to go into online advertising. The launch came in January 1999. The founders faced a choice between a search engine, directories and advertising. They chose advertising as the most “moneyed” field, even though in the late 90s the Ukrainian internet was very small and the online advertising market was only just taking shape.
They started in a garage, with a single computer entered on the books for about three hundred dollars. The first employee appeared a month and a half after the launch, and for a couple of months he was paid out of the founders’ own pockets. Such a state of affairs was then normal for small internet projects that lived on their own funds and had no steady revenue.
Growth and numbers
According to Mas, the network twice became the largest in Ukraine. The first time was six months after the launch, when UBN was showing around 300,000 impressions a day. The second time, roughly a month before the 2008 interview, the volume had grown to 36 million impressions a day. The nearest competitors then had around 25 million. By his estimate, the average user saw four banners from the network a day.
In the Advertology interview, Mas put the first leadership at “six months.” Later, in a conversation with “Computer Review,” he recalled it differently: “it seems, after two months.” This publication uses the version recorded in March 2008, as the closest to the events and made before the years had passed.
Mas compared the business of the network to mining. According to him, sometimes you immediately hit a gold vein, and sometimes you have to “dig and dig” for a long time. This thought well described how the market was built: some advertising connections brought money at once, others required time and patience.
“Advertising is like the blood of the Internet”
With this phrase Mas explained why UBN had bet specifically on banners. Without advertising, by his logic, sites and services cannot exist financially, and therefore the advertising network turns out to be infrastructure for the entire Ukrainian internet. In the interview he also named social networks, contextual and viral advertising as promising. In 2008 these directions were only beginning to gain weight in Ukraine, and for the advertising network they looked like a new field for growth.
What happened next
Mas was not only the founder of UBN. In March 2000 he became director of the “Ukrainian Portal” (UAPortal), and in 2008 he took part in a new project. On August 22, 2008, Mail.ua entered closed testing. Mas was the architect of the service, and investments in the project were reported to exceed a million dollars. They were contributed by the group “Internet Invest.”
In April 2009, to mark UBN’s tenth anniversary, the first Ukrainian Forum of Internet Figures, later called iForum, was held in Kyiv. It was attended by 1,280 people. Mas drew up the forum program and led one of the streams devoted to internet business. Thus the history of the network, which began in a garage with a single computer, poured into one of the main professional venues of the Ukrainian internet.
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