Moscow, January 23, 2008 - OAO RBC Information Systems (RTS, MICEX: RBCI) is entering the contextual advertising market. The company has completed the acquisition of Magna, a context-based advertising network offering the technology for placing ads based on the content analysis of partner websites. RBC has also set up an in-house agency AdSell to focus on context-sensitive ad sales.

Magna's technology is similar to that of its foreign counterpart, Google's AdSense solution, tracking Internet user interests and displaying ads for each particular user relevant to the content of the web sites that he visits. Magna offers its clients effective tools for advertising campaign planning and cost control. The advertiser is free to choose key words from a list of words matching the content of the network's partner websites. Then the advertiser is involved in creation of an ad and participates in the auction to determine the cost per click for the selected words.

RBC believes that by mid-2008, Magna's clients will gain access to a monthly audience of over 20m users. The company also plans to boost the number of Magna's ad impressions with the help of adding its general interest Internet resources to the network. As such, RBC expects that over the course of 2008, Magna's ad impressions will reach 5 billion a month.

"RBC is one of the key players on the Russian Internet banner advertising market. We are taking up contextual ad sales in order to complete the range of advertising services for our clients. We are happy to offer our 3,500 ad customers a new advertising format. In addition, we are now positioned to target new clients with smaller advertising budgets, who usually use the classifieds format. We estimate that, with the synergy between the new service and RBC's existing business and experience in managing Internet projects, we will be able to cover around 15% of Russia's contextual advertising market in three years time," RBC Media's General Director Artyom Inutin said.

Contextual advertising is one of the fastest developing advertising market sectors. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the US context-sensitive advertising market will triple in the next 5 years and will reach $25bn in 2012. According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, in 2007 contextual ad sales rose 72% in the British Internet. Analysts estimate that the Russian market is also growing very fast, and is projected to reach $400m in 2010¹.

¹ - Source: RACA, Video International, Troika Dialog, October 2007