The conversation had a practical trigger. Shortly before, AIN.UA had examined the multimedia portal and wondered how such services survive. The authors put the market's main dilemma in the headline: how to charge for video and music without violating rights holders' rights and without scaring users away. For the Ukrainian internet in 2010 this was not an academic question. Legal catalogues were few, pirated copies were free, and advertising in videos was only just becoming noticeable.
A vertical instead of a shop
Mas believes that selling content at retail rests on a “vertical”, that is, a model in which one company controls both the device and the delivery channel. He cites Apple with the iPod and iPhone and Amazon with the Kindle. These companies do not simply sell music or books; they create a closed environment where the buyer does not choose between a dozen players, stores and formats. Pre-roll, that is, a short ad before a video starts, could also become part of such a vertical, according to Mas, but only on one condition: the owner of the platform must not overdo it.
He took his example from his own experience. Buying a film on DVD, Mas says, he is sometimes forced to watch up to fifteen minutes of advertising that cannot be skipped. The irritation from such a practice is understandable to anyone who has ever waited for a film to start after the idents. The main point in his logic is different: users are prepared to tolerate advertising if in return they get convenient access to content without extra steps. Mas put it this way: “After all, each of the business models is a cultural tradition.” What he meant was that the usual ways of paying and watching grow out of long-standing consumption practices, and new models take hold only when they break the old habit gently.
The numbers
The concrete figures in the piece came from Yuriy Piskovoy. According to his data, the volume of the internet advertising market in 2010 was about twenty million dollars. He estimated the royalties market, that is, payments to rights holders, at 30 million hryvnias. Pre-rolls, according to Piskovoy, brought about a fifth of its advertising revenue. These figures relate to, not to Mas, and in the piece they are given precisely as that company's position.
The most telling indicator was click-through rate. The CTR, that is, the share of impressions after which a user clicked on the ad, for the pre-roll in the Para Normalnykh clip was 14 per cent. A banner in the same period, according to Piskovoy, had 0.48 per cent. The difference of almost thirty times explains why video publishers readily moved to clips before viewing. A banner is easy to ignore, while a short clip that the viewer is waiting for anyway forces them to watch.
“After all, each of the business models is a cultural tradition.”
What happened next
In 2010 Mas was presented in the piece as the creator of Infostore, but his path on the internet had begun much earlier. In January 1999, together with Ruslan Dmytrakovych, he launched the Ukrainian Banner Network, which ran on Perl, and the first expenses came to about one hundred dollars. In March 2000 he headed the Ukrainian Portal (UAPortal). In August 2008 Mail.ua went into closed testing, Mas was the project's architect, and investment from the Internet Invest group exceeded one million dollars. That same summer he became one of the organisers of the first Ukrainian Forum of Internet Figures, which in April 2009 gathered 1,280 participants.
Infostore's fate in those years was different. In early December 2008, Ministry of Internal Affairs officers seized the project's servers, and the search lasted twelve hours. For the content market this became one of the notable episodes of a time when disputes over the legality of file-sharing moved from forums to courts and the offices of law enforcement agencies. In 2012 Mail.ua passed to Mail.ru Group. The group's vice-president Anna Artamonova confirmed the deal, and according to unofficial data it was valued at around $500,000 with an audience of about 300,000 users. In 2016 Mas became an adviser to Kyivstar on digital technologies.
Oleksiy Mas died in Kyiv on 6 October 2021 in his forty-eighth year, after an illness. His death was reported on 8 October by his brother Viktor Mas.
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