Yandex and Google enter into advertising partnership

Under the agreement, Google's advertising clients will gain access to the advertising inventory offered by publishers in Yandex's advertising network, while Yandex's advertising clients will be able to bid for display inventory in Google's real-time bidding marketplace DoubleClick AdExchange.

This partnership will result in a larger number of bidders, which is expected to boost revenue for the most sought-after advertising spaces, Yandex said in a statement.

Yandex, which is ahead of Google in Russia with a market share of over 60 percent, said technical integration is expected to take several months.

The agreement only relates to display advertising, and does not cover text-based contextual advertising, Yandex said in a statement.

In January, Yandex signed an agreement with Facebook for access to content from some of the social networking site's users in a move to further improve its search results.

Yandex had said it would get full access to public data from Facebook users in Russia, CIS countries including Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, and in Turkey. Apart from the users' posts, its search results will soon also display other users' comments on them.

The Facebook-Yandex agreement is non-cash and is based on mutual benefits with Yandex improving the quality of its search results and Facebook getting more traffic, a Yandex spokeswoman said.

Russia's social networking landscape is dominated by local players such as Vkontakte, part-owned by Internet holding company Mail.ru, while Facebook is ranked an estimated fourth most popular site.

© Thomson Reuters 2014