In contact with Pavel Durov: how much does the creator of VK and Telegram earn?

Interesting facts in the biography of Pavel Durov

Pavel Durov is the brightest representative of a new generation of purposeful and enterprising young people. Despite the mountains of garbage that fall on him on the Internet, we can safely say that Pavel Durov is an interesting person, a personality worthy of admiration.

Although the fame of his main project Vkontakte.ru brought him some fame, there is not much information about Pavel Durov himself, because he is clearly not a public person. Therefore, in this article we will try to present you with a more or less detailed biography of this young entrepreneur, bit by bit collecting everything that is on the Internet.

Pavel Valerievich Durov was born on October 10, 1984 in Leningrad. His father is the famous philologist Valery Semyonovich Durov, the author of many scientific works. Pavel’s mother is also an educated woman and has two higher educations.

“I owe a lot to my parents: upbringing, origin, support. They set an example of optimism and hard work even during difficult times for our family.”

How did a meeting between two classmates grow into a successful IT project?

Everyone knows that the main creator of VKontakte is Pavel Durov, a bright personality and a talented programmer. Even during his student years, he actively developed, for example, he created the forum of St. Petersburg State University.

By chance, his classmate Vyacheslav Mirilashvili, with whom they lost contact 7 years ago, found out about this. While studying at an American university, Vyacheslav noticed how quickly social networks were popularizing. With this idea, he “came” to Durov, sending a fateful letter to his email. Soon they were discussing the promising idea of ​​finding classmates and fellow students via the Internet.

By the time VKontakte was developed, Durov had almost everything - knowledge and experience in programming, an understanding of the target audience and a base of loyal student forum participants, but no money. This issue was resolved by Mirilashvili.

Scandals associated with the name of Pavel Durov

In December 2011, in connection with protests against the falsification of the State Duma election results, the FSB suggested that Durov block five communities (four of which contain the phrase “against United Russia” in their names) and two meetings on the VKontakte network. Durov refused to do this. After this, he was summoned to give explanations to the St. Petersburg prosecutor's office.

Durov's act instantly turned him into an icon of the opposition. The FSB itself refused! But Pavel immediately regained his image as a man who does not care about politics and only cares about business.

“In fact, this was a proposal to voluntarily give a head start to all competing sites, squeezing out the active and passionate part of the audience,” he said in an open letter. “If foreign sites continue to exist in a free field, and Russian ones begin to be censored, RuNet can only expect a slow death. To ensure a playing field in which such requests were unthinkable, I drew the attention of the audience and other Internet companies, and then senior government officials, to the requests of the St. Petersburg FSB.

In this exciting game of early December, we showed not so much courage as common sense. If you look at it, Western observers are now praising us for the same thing that they have always criticized us for - for the lack of strict censorship of user activity. My rapid transformation from “pirate” and “porn king” to defender of freedoms reflects only the inconsistency in their beliefs. While they apply different standards to different types of censorship, our position remains unchanged and boils down to one statement: it makes no sense to remove from one Internet site something that can be quickly found on others.”

Another scandal, which, unlike the previous one, did not have the best effect on Pavel Durov’s reputation, occurred on the city day, celebrated in St. Petersburg on May 28, 2012. From the window of his office, Pavel threw five thousand dollar bills attached to paper airplanes into the crowd gathered on the street. People threw themselves at this money, pressing and beating each other, while Durov filmed it all on video.

Social media users burst out with angry messages:

“Durov threw five thousand dollar bills from the window and filmed how people threw themselves at this money. People from the crowd came out with broken noses, climbed onto traffic lights, and generally behaved like monkeys. Durov laughed heartily. Shame on you, Pavel..."

"Disgusting entertainment, to be honest..."

“City Day, everything is positive. Surprisingly, there is no crush or crowd of drunken lawless people. The embankment of the Griboyedov Canal, Pavel and Co. are looking out of the windows of the VK office, the throwing of 5,000 bills begins and with an arrogant royal grin they watch as the crowd begins to tear each other apart in the hope of catching the “gifts” of the “overlord”! The real St. Petersburg circus named after Durov..."

“It’s a shame to our society, which allows such acts to be committed; human honor and dignity have ceased to exist as a concept...”

However, there were those who justified Paul:

“Durov, it seems to me, simply did not imagine that such bestiality was possible in the center of St. Petersburg on a city holiday, he really did not think that everything would go so far...”

“What prevented the “victims” from passing by and not going after these handouts? The grief is clearly not from the mind. In my opinion, claims against Durov should be made last...”

Durov himself, answering a question on Twitter about why he was scattering money, said the following: “Colleagues decided to support the holiday atmosphere in the form of a small action, but had to quickly stop - people began to go wild.”

However, no matter what motives drive the young millionaire, the act is not beautiful in any case, and one can only hope that Pavel realized the immorality of his behavior.

Birthday of social media VKontakte

The website vkontakte.ru was registered on October 1, 2006, but it is believed that the launch date of the social network coincides with the birthday of its creator - October 10 of the same year, when VKontakte acquired its first functionality.

Have you already guessed where the first users of the social network came from? Of course, from the university forum, in which Durov continued to remain an administrator. At first, students registered by invitation, indicating their real name and surname. After about a month, free registration appeared, and the number of users gradually increased.

Pavel Durov – creator of VKontakte

short biography

• Full name: Pavel Valerievich Durov;
• birthday: October 10, 1984;
• place of birth - St. Petersburg, Russia;
• parents - father Valery Semenovich Durov, mother Albina Aleksandrovna Durova;
• citizenship - Russia, Saint Kitts and Nevis;
• education - Faculty of Philology, St. Petersburg State University;
• religion - libertarianism,
• marital status: Not maried;
• profession - entrepreneur;
• height, weight - 176 cm, 75 kg.

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/durov/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/durov VK - https://vk.com/id1 Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/durovTelegram

Interesting facts:

• Pavel Durov is a vegetarian;
• adheres to libertarianism;
• claims that he does not fall in love because love is a drug;
• has the rank of reserve lieutenant;
• He names Che Guevara and Steve Jobs as sources of inspiration.

Foundation of VKontakte LLC and first successes

VKontakte LLC was founded at the beginning of 2007. As expected, Vyacheslav Mirilashvili became the owner of 60% of the shares. The rest were divided between Pavel Durov - 20%, Mikhail Mirilashvili and Lev Leviev - 10% each. Pavel’s brother, Nikolai Durov, becomes the technical director.

In its first years of development, VKontakte immediately competed with the then popular social media Odnoklassniki, and in 2008 it confidently overtook it, taking the position of the most popular resource on the Runet (according to Alexa). Meanwhile, new functionality appears on VKontakte - the ability to leave anonymous opinions, draw graffiti on users’ walls, audio and video recordings, and applications.

Transition to business monetization

The project required significant investments in the development and purchase of new servers, so commercial functions appeared on VKontakte: increasing the rating using paid SMS, as well as the “Gifts” application with the purchase of pictures that can be sent to other users.

But this was not enough. Contrary to its initial position, in the summer of 2008 the company entered into a contract under which advertising banners would appear on social media. The audience size exceeds 20 million users, and at the end of 2008, the company's net profit is $4.5 million.

VKontakte plans to popularize abroad

In 2009, Lev Leviev (executive director) plans to develop abroad, so social media buys the domain name vk.com. According to management plans, the vk.com website should be launched in 12 languages ​​in the fall of 2009.

In the same year, the social network opened an API for developers. As a result, the company receives a new format of income. For example, the developers managed to get $20 million from the game “Happy Farmer,” with half of the amount going into the pocket of the social network. At the end of 2009, VKontakte's net profit amounted to $11.6 million.

VKontakte audience 70 million users

VKontakte receives the status of the largest social network on the Russian Internet. According to TNS statistics, in the summer of 2010, the monthly number of users of the social network was 19.6 million. By the fall of the same year, the number of registered users already exceeded 70 million.

The social network provides free access to the mobile portal 0.vkontakte.ru, the purpose of which is to quickly load web pages via the mobile Internet. In essence, it was a lightweight website format for mobile phones - m.vkontakte.ru.

By this time, 32.55% of VKontakte belonged to Mail.Ru Group, which provided a report for 2010. It again showed significant growth: VKontakte’s revenue amounted to $93.8 million, and EBIDTA was $28.4 million.

Confrontation between Mail.Ru Group and Durov

In the summer of 2011, Mail.Ru Group increases its share in social media by another 7.44%, reaching 39.99%. It is clear that the holding needed complete control over the social network - VKontakte was a competitor, “taking away” the audience from Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir, owned by Mail.Ru Group. The company's leaders themselves stated this.

The eccentric Pavel Durov did not stand aside, commenting on these statements on his Instagram account - in the photo he depicted a “figure with a middle finger” and explained that Mail.Ru Group may not count on the takeover of VKontakte. But he was still wrong about this.

Copyright infringement

More than once, Durov and VKontakte LLC were sued for copyright infringement - posting films in the public domain on the website.

“This is 30 million criminals, and the accomplices are known! - Film director Alexander Akopov scolded VKontakte users. “You can’t put everyone in prison, but you can put 10,000 in prison!” The words of the copyright holder instantly spread across blogs and the media. Akopov got mad at Durov for actually maintaining the largest repository of pirated content in Russia. Approximately half of the video impressions on the RuNet occur on VKontakte... And this is a competitive advantage of Durov’s network.

The All-Russian State Television and Radio Company was the first to go to court. VGTRK demanded that several Internet platforms remove content belonging to it. Everyone agreed except VKontakte, and in the end the TV people lost to Durov. Nevertheless, the scandals continued.

“We came with a series from the ABC television company, for which we have exclusive rights to Russian territory,” an Internet entrepreneur who wished to remain anonymous said in an interview with Forbes magazine. — We looked at VKontakte, and there were 65,000 of our videos. And we have to remove all of this. And four days later, another 30,000 appeared...” This is the main complaint of copyright holders - services like YouTube and Dailymotion have implemented a system for semi-automatic video deletion, but on VKontakte this is done only manually.

Durov considered the freedom to disseminate information as an organic feature of the Internet, but in order to appease copyright holders, he again had to make a deal with his own beliefs. VKontakte promised to develop more advanced filters, and in the meantime invited content factories to open and promote their pages.

20 Century Fox was the first to cave in to the “Corporation of Excellence,” but the rest are in no hurry to follow. For example, providers that are part of the Virgin Media group, owned by the famous billionaire Richard Branson, have blocked their clients from accessing the social network.

With such an approach to content, you can’t even dream of listing shares on Western stock exchanges. “It is unlikely that an IPO of VKontakte will be possible without resolving all issues regarding pirated content with copyright holders. I don’t want to use the word “impossible,” but this is too serious a question,” a representative of one of the international banks that participated in the Yandex IPO said in an interview with Forbes.

This appears to have been one of the reasons for the cleansing campaign that Durov intensified in 2010. However, this purge did not reduce the influx of users. Today, VKontakte is ahead of the Russian-language segment of Facebook, Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir in terms of the number of users and traffic.

The network receives more than half of its revenue from advertising - as already mentioned, Durov abandoned banners, relying on contextual ads. “VKontakte’s strategy is not to squeeze out ARPU (revenue per user), but to increase the user base,” he says. And it must be said that this strategy is yielding results; on September 10, 2012, VKontakte boasted another traffic record - 38.4 million users visited the resource’s pages per day. This is 50% more than the average daily traffic to the resource in September 2011.

Scandals around VKontakte and unprofitable years

In 2011, the FSB asked to close political opposition groups registered on VKontakte. But Durov’s team ignores pressure from the intelligence services, explaining that the social network is an apolitical project that does not express support for any of the parties.

Then the work of the project was significantly affected by anti-piracy laws - the administration had to carry out the so-called cleansing of content on social media. Further, the United States accuses the domestic social network of providing access to intellectual property without obtaining permission from the copyright holder. In general, there were quite a lot of similar cases.

The Mail.Ru Group holding reports that from 2008 to 2011. VKontakte was a profitable project, but in 2012 the project suffered a net loss of 210 million rubles, and in 2013 – 137 million rubles.

Interesting facts in the biography of Pavel Durov

Durov has no planes, cars or houses. He goes to work by metro and spends the night in a rented room measuring 18-20 square meters. In addition, the brilliant IT businessman completely gave up alcohol, meat and expensive clothes.

But Pavel travels a lot - “This year I was lucky enough to visit Italy, France, Germany, the USA, Israel, Austria, Dubai. I would like to visit Switzerland during the May holidays. Also of interest are the medieval cities of Belgium. In general, I like the energy of Manhattan, and the atmosphere of the historical center of Vienna inspires me. But I love St. Petersburg more. It is the most beautiful city in Eastern Europe, both in terms of architecture and people.”

Pavel Durov adheres to libertarian economic and political views. Libertarianism is a political philosophy based on the prohibition of “aggressive violence,” that is, the prohibition of using force or the threat of force against another person or his property against that person’s will. The prohibition against aggressive violence is legal, not ethical. In other words, libertarianism implies that violations of this prohibition should be prosecuted.

In 2007, the newspaper “Business Petersburg” was recognized as one of the winners in the “Best Young Entrepreneurs of 2007” competition.

In 2011, Pavel Durov, as well as Arkady Volozh, CEO, and Yuri Milner, co-owner of Mail.ru Group, became leaders of the TOP-30 key persons who most influenced the development of the Runet according to the Russian version of Forbes magazine.

When asked if you have an idol, Durov replies, “Yes. Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. He is a brilliant organizer, designer and thinker. He gave the world many unique devices that made our lives better. It’s amazing that we live at the same time as this man.”

Pavel Durov gave his first public interview at a specialized DLD conference at the beginning of 2012 in Munich.

How did Mail.Ru Group buy out 100% of VKontakte shares in 2014?

In April 2014, information appeared that 48% of VKontakte shares were purchased by the United Capital Partners fund - these were the shares of Vyacheslav and Mikhail Mirilashvili, as well as executive director Lev Leviev.

How and why? The motives of the co-founders, as well as the amount of the transaction, were not subject to disclosure. Thus, United Capital Partners becomes the largest shareholder of the social network. At the same time, 40% remains with Mail.Ru Group, and 12% with Durov. Meanwhile, VKontakte is setting new records.

On January 20, 2014, the number of social network users per day reached a record 60.2 million people. (LiveInternet statistics). Net profit in 2014 amounted to 709 million rubles, which is 15 times higher than the previous year.

Photo from Durov’s personal VKontakte page (January 21, 2014)

In January, Durov sells his share of VKontakte to Ivan Tavrin, who served as CEO at Megafon. And here you can track interesting facts.

As it turned out, the main owner of Megafon was Alisher Usmanov, who was also the controlling shareholder of Mail.ru Group. That is, Tavrin and Usmanov were actually partners. As a result, Usmanov, albeit indirectly, gained control over the VKontakte project, since the total share of Mail.ru Group and Tavrin amounted to 52% of the shares. By the way, the latter sold his 12% stake in Mail.ru Group in March.

In September, the holding announced that it was buying out the remaining 48% and receiving a 100% share of VKontakte. This is how Pavel Durov loses his “fight” to Mail.ru Group, to whom we can give credit. To completely absorb a seemingly unattainable project in about six months is not an easy task.

Charitable activities of Pavel Durov

Pavel Durov actively participates in sponsoring domestic student teams at the World Programming Championships. On July 16, 2012, Pavel Durov awarded 60 thousand dollars to the best programmers in the world. They turned out to be schoolchildren from China. The first and second places of the Open World Programming Championship VK Cup, initiated by Pavel Durov, were taken by schoolchildren from China. They received $30 thousand and $20 thousand respectively. Third place went to a schoolboy from Belarus, he received $10 thousand.

“In the VK Cup competition, we wanted to select and reward the best developers in the world. We made no restrictions on the country of residence - and rewarded the best of the best algorithmists on the planet,” said Pavel Durov.

In March 2012, it became known that the Wikimedia Foundation accepted a donation from Pavel Durov. Durov promised to donate $1 million for the development of Wikipedia in a live conference with the participation of the encyclopedia's management in January 2012. He explained his desire to support the encyclopedia financially by the fact that the Wikipedia project is very important for the Internet and is a global phenomenon.

Also, Pavel Durov, together with Yuri Milner, finances Internet startups. Their creators receive $25 thousand free of charge. At first glance, this is not such a large amount for a startup. Other startup support projects operating in Russia offer double or even quadruple the amount.

However, they impose certain obligations on developers - from paying part of the income to providing management of the company. And Start Fellows grants are pure charity. That is, by providing money, Milner and Durov do not demand anything in return. The startup can continue to develop the project and attract other sponsors, or maybe, theoretically, simply sell the idea profitably and get money without ultimately releasing any startup.

How does VKontakte live under the leadership of Mail.ru Group?

Now the company is more loyal to cooperation with intelligence agencies. Thus, in the summer of 2021, a social media spokesman confirmed the information that VKontakte transferred data about its users to law enforcement agencies. Do you think through the court? Surprisingly, this happened simply at the request of the intelligence service. This statement was made by Evgeny Krasnikov at a forum in Kazan.

In 2021, agreements were signed between the social network and major copyright holders of music products, including such as Universal Music, Believe Digital, Sony Music. But this did not change the US attitude towards the Russian social network.

In 2021, VKontakte is once again listed on the updated list of the US Department of Commerce, which consists of the 25 largest pirate sites. I don’t think it’s even worth talking about Ukrainian sanctions in 2021 - everyone knows that.

Official results of Mail.Ru Group for 2021: VKontakte’s revenue increased significantly and amounted to 18 billion rubles. Monthly audience of 97 million users.

As before, the social network is constantly acquiring new features: secure video and voice calls in applications for mobile devices, algorithms (protection of unique content), live covers, archiving of recordings and others.

The social network strives to penetrate more into the lives of its users. For example, the VK Hackathon project organizes large-scale competitions for developers with prize funds. VK Cup holds annual championships among programmers, VK Fest organizes open-air festivals.

Official announcement of the 5th VK Hackathon (2019)

How much does Durov earn: counting down to the second!

This year, Forbes magazine estimated the fortune of Pavel Durov at $2,700,000,000, which is $1,000,000,000 more than in 2021. Based on the above data, Durov’s income statistics are as follows:

By the way, the businessman bought citizenship of the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis for $250,000. The expenses for it would have paid off in a couple of hours at the current earnings of the creator of VKontakte.