Mail.ru Group has announced changes in the company’s top management. Yuri Novikov has now taken the role of Youla CEO, while the project’s founder Egor Abramets is now Mail.ru Group’s Vice President for Advertising Technologies.

Yuri Novikov will take on the role of CEO at Youla. Earlier, he was in charge of the project’s monetization as well as the job classified Worki (part of Youla business unit).

Youla’s founder Egor Abramets has been appointed Vice President for Advertising Technologies at Mail.ru Group. Novikov and his team will continue growing Youla’s classifieds business under Abramets’ guidance, while he will focus on developing the Mail.ru Group’s advertising tech department.

Boris Dobrodeev, Mail.ru Group CEO:

“The Youla team had many large-scale launches in 2019, when, for example, it became world’s first classifieds service to launch video calls, or when Worki integrated with VKontakte. This led to growth for both projects, and Yuri’s appointment is a signal that we are stepping up our scaling. In his new role, Egor will be able to focus on developing advertising technologies while supervising the classifieds vertical.”

Egor Abramets, Mail.ru Group Vic President for Advertising Technologies:

“I trust Yuri with heading Youla – we have proven ourselves as a tech leader, so it’s now time to also dominate in terms of market share, and Yuri has the experience to make it happen. I’ve plunged into advertising, as now business is in need of new, more effective solutions for working with clients and attracting new users.”

Yuri Novikov, Youla CEO:

“Egor set the bar really high, and we are aiming to maintain the momentum by becoming market leaders and transforming the classifieds market in Russia”

Before joining the Youla team in early 2019, Novikov worked for four years at Avito as Head of B2C. In 2019, under Yuri’s supervision Youla doubled its annual revenue to reach 2.1 billion rubles.

Egor Abramets has been the head of Mail.ru Group’s advertising tech department since September 2019 while maintaining his position as Youla CEO. Over this period, VKontakte (VK) introduced promoting content from mobile devices, promoting personal pages, and statistics for business pages, while myTarget added automatic synonym suggestions for contextual targeting, the ‘loan button’ format for Youla, and updated its search for user look-alikes technology. In late March, VK offered to double advertiser budgets as part of its SME support initiative, spending more than 62 million rubles on the program over six weeks.

The Youla classifieds service was founded in October 2015; after two years, it became one of the top 5 most downloaded iOS apps. Since its launch, the service has strived to be a technological leader. In May 2017, Youla became Russia’s first classifieds service with secure customer-to-customer payments and delivery, and in 2019 it launched free audio and video calls within the app. In May 2019, Youla was joined by job classified Worki. As of the end of 2019, Youla’s monthly audience stood at 27 million users.