The post appeared at 10:34; its author, Alexander Melnik, did not summarize the presentation. The page consists of two videos hosted on YouTube, and there is no text transcript in the article. Therefore, the paradoxes themselves, which Mas listed before the audience, can only be reconstructed from the recording. The talk was aimed at marketers who were bringing a product online for the first time and were accustomed to the laws of traditional advertising.
The man who built the banner market
Alexey Mas was born in 1974. He entered the radio physics faculty of Kyiv State University in 1991 without exams, on the strength of his results in physics olympiads. In the 1990s he worked at a research institute and a bank, and in September 1997 he moved to the National Bank of Ukraine, where he handled Visa processing on the HP-Unix platform. In January 1999, together with Ruslan Dmitrakovich, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network, known as UBS. The first version was written in Perl in three weeks, and the costs amounted to about 100 dollars.
In parallel, Mas ran other internet projects. On March 7, 2000, he became director of the Ukrainian Portal, UAPortal, which was founded by Alexander Soroka, Alexander Koreshkov and Alexander Barabash of IP-Telecom. In the autumn of 2001 he sat on the expert jury of the Sun Awards, whose results were announced on November 19. Talks of this kind were routine for industry people at the time: the market was only learning to measure online advertising, and anyone who had seen real numbers became a sought-after speaker.
The numbers the network worked with
In an interview on March 21, 2008, Mas cited the scale of UBS: 36 million impressions per day. A banner network sells ad space across many sites at once and connects advertisers with resource owners. That is why its statistics show how audiences respond to thousands of placements simultaneously, and conclusions about how advertising works in practice were based on such material.
It was from this experience that practical discussions about advertising grew. For a marketer just going online, the gap between expectation and result was the main problem, and the themes of such talks were built around it. The video of the talk at Product Marketing captures just such a discussion in its original form.
What came next
Mas's internet business continued to develop. On August 22, 2008, the closed beta of Mail.ua, of which he was the architect, was launched. The project was backed by the Internet Invest group, which invested more than a million dollars. On April 1, 2009, the first Ukrainian Internet Professionals Forum, the future iForum, was held in Kyiv, timed to the tenth anniversary of UBS, and it drew 1,280 participants.
A year after the talk, in July and August 2012, Mail.ua passed to Mail.ru Group. According to unofficial data, the deal was worth about 500 thousand dollars, and the project's audience was around 300 thousand users. Mail.Ru Group vice-president Anna Artamonova confirmed the purchase.
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