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VK (company)

Russian internet company

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 27, 2026
Entity authorityQ1885456
Source-derived summary

VK, known as Mail.ru Group until 12 October 2021, is a Russian technology company. It started in 1998 as the parent company of Mail.ru, an e-mail service, and went on to become a major corporate figure in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet.

VK operates an e-mail service, Internet portal Mail.ru, and Russian social networking services VK, Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir. Additionally, VK manages various e-commerce, transport and communication platforms. It also offers business-oriented products, including a corporate email and communication system.

In 2014, VK's sites reached approximately 86% of Russian Internet users on a monthly basis, and the company was in the top 5 of the largest Internet companies based on the number of total pages viewed.

In October 2021, Mail.ru Group was renamed VK Company Limited, after its most popular product, VKontakte.

History

The business was originally owned by Port.ru, a company founded in 1998 by Eugene Goland, Michael Zaitsev and Alexey Krivenkov as a spin-off from DataArt. It received an initial investment of US$1 million from investor James Melcher.

The Mail.ru business expanded rapidly to reach the No.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “VK (company)” is russian internet company. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through company, Russian and internet, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA strong contextual entry point for chronology, institutions and public events when official records are distinguished from later interpretation. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2021, 1998, 2014—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2005. For this dossier, company, Russian and internet is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “russian internet company” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1885456. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021, 1998 and 2014.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “VK (company)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow VK (company) primary sources, VK (company) archive and company research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “VK (company)”?
  2. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
  3. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from VK (company)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.