My.Games monetizes the monetizer – Kommersant
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The Boosty service, which after blocking Patreon in Russia has become one of the most popular content monetization platforms, can be sold before the end of the year. According to Kommersant, My.Games, which manages it, is already negotiating with potential buyers. Analysts estimated the asset at $5-10 million. Experts call the VK holding one of the contenders for Boosty.
The My.Games company (in the fall of 2022, VK sold the asset to the founder of the Leta Capital fund, Alexander Chachava), which owns the Boosty content monetization service, is looking for a buyer for it, sources told Kommersant in the media market. The interlocutor of Kommersant, who is familiar with the course of negotiations, clarifies that My.Games is going to “restructure” the service: “Within its framework, the platform will be transferred to a separate Russian legal entity, which will be sold by the end of the year, there are already several potential buyers.” My.Games didn’t answer “b”.
Boosty was created in 2019 by analogy with the crowdfunding platform Patreon, blocked by Roskomnadzor in 2022. The development was handled by Mail.ru Group, the service for streamers Donation Alerts (part of My.Games) was responsible for testing Boosty. The platform involves monthly payments from content consumers to the author, who determines the subscription levels, their content, and the cost of access. So, the service planned to earn on a commission of 7% (includes a commission of payment systems), Roman Novikov, director of the adVentures Mail.ru Group department, said in May 2019. The monthly audience of the service, according to SimilarWeb, is about 20 million users.
The value of the asset can be from $10 million, Timur Nigmatullin, senior investment consultant at Finam, believes. Leta Capital is a private investment company, he notes: “We can talk not only about the sale, but also about the restructuring of previously acquired assets within the funds being formed.” Finam analyst Leonid Delitsyn estimates the asset at $4-5 million. He believes that Boosty can acquire another venture capital fund with a portfolio of projects in the gaming industry. A Kommersant source in the media market believes that VK could become the buyer of the asset: “This would allow the holding to integrate the platform with VK Donut and attract a new audience of authors and content creators.” VK declined to comment.
After the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine, Visa and Mastercard payment systems announced the suspension of activities in Russia, limiting international transactions, InterMedia recalled: “This made it difficult both to pay for a subscription to authors through Patreon, and to withdraw money from the platform for the authors themselves.” As a result, the agency noted, this led to the rapid growth of domestic analogues, for example, Boosty and VK Donut. So, at the end of 2022, Boosty reported a tenfold increase in author registrations since the beginning of the year. The average donation amount on the platform was almost 2 thousand rubles, the acquisition of access to content through messages – 1.2 thousand rubles, and the average monthly payment – 129 rubles.
According to the InterMedia Boosty methodology, it refers not to crowdfunding, but to donation services, says the leading expert of the agency Pavel Solomatin: “Such services organize mass payments to content authors and subscriptions to them, and in terms of fundraising they have long surpassed traditional crowdfunding.”
Thus, crowdfunding projects in the field of culture collected 280.9 million rubles in 2022, while donation services – 1.2 billion rubles, the expert notes. Boosty occupies much more than half of this market, the rest is shared by VK Donut, LitMarket, and others. The site may be very interesting for large corporations that want to actively develop user-generated content, Mr. Solomatin believes: “But it is likely that after the deal the rules will seriously change for authors.
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