What awaits VKontakte?

Publication date: 27 February 2020

In February 2020, Mail.ru Group shared its development plans for VKontakte as a superapp. The company wants to strengthen its ecosystem by means of higher levels of cross-selling efficiency and integration between Mail.ru Group’s projects.

Mail.ru Group will use VK SuperAppKit technology for integration of its fundamental projects:

• Combo loyalty program;
• Marusya voice assistant;
• VKontakte account based single ID;
• VK Pay, which will be scaled up into other Mail.ru Group’s projects;
• VK Mini Apps, which will become a single platform for Mail.ru Group’s developers.

Mail.ru Group is aiming at making VKontakte the major Russian superapp, increasing engagement among 30+ audience as well as investing in its content platform (including video and audio), messaging features, Mini Apps, and other projects. Regarding VKontakte, priority will be given to games, social commerce, small- and medium-sized businesses.

New e-commerce platform

VKontakte has introduced a new e-commerce platform. The first stage of changes was the launch of “Store 2.0”.
VKontakte put together all tools a business might need to start selling on the social network. Users will no longer have to add each tool individually.
Moreover, a number of new features were introduced: product characteristics, order status tracking, quick access to support.
To start optimizing e-commerce activity, users only need to enable “Store 2.0” in the settings menu. The section with all available tools will appear in the community menu.

VKontakte: 2019 results

In 2019, the average amount of time users spent on VKontakte increased by 12.5% (up to 36 minutes daily); the average amount of time spent from mobile devices increased by 16%. Users aged 12-24 years remain the most active audience. They spend on average 68 minutes a day on VKontakte. According to Mediascope, Russian users visit VKontakte much more often than any other social network—every second day.