The interview took place just over a day before the forum opened. Mas was one of the creators of the Ukrainian Banner Network (UBN) together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich. The network launched in January 1999: according to Mas, the first version took three weeks of work in Perl and about $100 in expenses. The forum was timed to the tenth anniversary of UBN. Mas called the "Internet Day" held by the site "KIEV2000" in the early 2000s the prototype of the event. Such meetings were rare then, and the very idea of gathering advertisers, developers and site owners in one hall looked new for the Ukrainian market.
The program featured Alexander Olshansky, Viktor Dostov, Matt Colebourne, Sergey Arabadzhi from ITC, Sergey Kotyrev from Yumisoft, Alexey Romanenko from Begun and Sergey Petrenko from Yandex. From the e-commerce segment, representatives of the stores Futbolka and Yakaboo spoke. Such a lineup reflected the main theme of the year: internet business in Ukraine was different in scale, from search giants to small online stores, and all of them were simultaneously trying to understand how to survive the crisis.
Crisis and the new price of advertising
Speaking about the market, Mas remained cautiously optimistic. According to him, the crisis rolled the industry back about two years, to the level of 2007. However, a month before the interview the market had begun to grow. The main thing that had changed, as Mas saw it: the internet had "entered the arsenal" as the cheapest advertising medium. Advertisers cutting budgets on television and in print were looking for alternatives, and the network turned out to be one of the first places the money went. A banner, that is, a graphic advertising block on a site, in this logic cost less, and reporting on it could be obtained faster than on a printed page.
Mas also explained the nature of the changes: a redistribution of the market is underway, and right now it is more profitable to buy a ready-made business than to invest in a new project from scratch. His formula was: "It falls fast – it rises fast too." For internet companies that survived the downturn, this meant a shift from growth at any cost to a search for sustainable sources of income and to buying up those who could not stay afloat.
"I would like to believe that for the internet the crisis is over"
This cautious hope, like the entire conversation, reflected the mood of the Ukrainian market in the spring of 2009. The economic downturn was hitting advertising budgets, but the internet, in Mas's view, was emerging from the crisis with a stronger position than other media.
Politicians and the internet wave
Mas spoke separately about politicians. In his observation, politicians fear the internet, and most of all those who came to power precisely on an internet wave. He recalled Yulia Tymoshenko's network "Ideal Country": it was, in his words, made for the elections, and after them the project dissolved. For internet projects created for a specific campaign, such a fate was typical: after the vote they were left with neither an audience nor a clear reason to exist.
The topic of political internet was not abstract for Mas. In early December 2008, a few months before the interview, the Interior Ministry seized the servers of Infostore, which Mas was involved with as the project's creator. The seizure included 18 servers, two storage systems and a switch, and the search lasted 12 hours. The interview given at the forum headquarters did not directly touch on this episode, but in the very conversation about power and the network there was the same unease as in his assessment of the market: the internet is changing fast, and those who do not understand it tend to see it as a threat.
Projects running in parallel
In August 2008, a few months before the interview, the Mail.ua email service began closed testing. Its architect was Mas, and the project was financed by the Internet Invest group, which invested more than $1 million. The group was headed by Alexander Olshansky, who spoke at the forum in April 2009. Thus two projects involving the same people ran in parallel: the forum as a platform for discussing the industry and the email service as an attempt to create one's own product amid the crisis.
The forum opened on April 1, 2009. The event, conceived for the tenth anniversary of UBN, became the first in a series of gatherings that over time came to be known as iForum.
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