About 30 billion rubles a year is the volume of the content services market in Russia. This money is divided between cellular operators (mainly Beeline and MegaFon) and companies that subscribe subscribers to dozens of useless services - from horoscopes to porn. There are many ways to "hang" the service: these are transparent banners, and fake labels, and automatic subscriptions. Even in companies that make money on content, they call their market thoroughly corrupt; only those close to the operators have the opportunity to make a profit on it.
This is how it happens …
“You have activated your subscription on number XXXX, the subscription fee is 30 rubles per day. The service is provided by LLC "#####", 8-800-XXX-XX-XX. To deactivate the service, send free STOP to XXXX "- such messages periodically receive Beeline subscribers. Most often near the end of the quarter - in March, June, September and December.
Many people are sincerely surprised by such notifications - after all, they did not subscribe to any services.
Calls to the support service do not help - the operators traditionally assure the victims that they themselves are to blame: they went online, clicked on some link and did not notice how they signed up. Subscribers are offered to do exactly with the instructions in the messages - to contact the company that provides the service. It is not difficult, because the phone number is indicated in the SMS.
There they will talk to you strictly according to the instructions.
According to it, for example, it is forbidden to associate subscribers with the management and report a complete list of sites with which the company works.
In response to the complaint, you will be offered to unsubscribe from the services and will be assured that nothing happens by chance: “You yourself went in and subscribed. Perhaps some kind of advertisement was clicked."
Promotional video:
If you're lucky, the operator will name the sites you allegedly visited. Moreover, the support services (they all call themselves carbon copy services) are not at all embarrassed that the addresses are strange - from among those that a reasonable person would not type in a browser.
For example, 14.vkvid.club or 20.videolike.pw.
Stories that you have not been to these sites will not convince anyone. Operators are used to angry reviews - it's not just people who regularly and supposedly voluntarily subscribe to sites with jokes, Uzbek YouTube, and low-grade silicone porn. Home appliances, barriers and GPS trackers also "independently enter sites" and "click on some banners."
"Giri", burning indicators and neutral Ministry of Internal Affairs
At the beginning of the decade, when the subscription market in Russia was only gaining momentum, Yuri Sinodov, the creator of the Internet business website Roem.ru, was investigating the work of content providers.
He agreed to tell the Daily Storm about how cellular operators and their “customer support” partners are now interacting.
- Three partners make money on content services: cellular operators, aggregators and smaller companies that sell their "services" to the second. The latter get the smallest part of the subscribers' money, because their services (videos, games, etc. - note. Daily Storm) are either of extremely low quality, or they do not even exist.
- What budgets can we talk about? How big is this story?
- According to my estimates, some time ago the total revenue of operators consisted of about 20 percent of such income.
Except for Tele2. They had white services. Fraudulent transactions occurred infrequently and incurred severe fines. Then such “services” began to decrease for MegaFon and MTS. The latter have practically no “fraudulent subscriptions” left in Moscow. But in the regions they survived: it is just that in the capital, people are more sensitive to such things, and therefore they strangled it all at some point.
- Why not everywhere?
- Operators have a very critical attitude to how much they can raise prices for their tariffs. Therefore, they prefer to roll out a low tariff, and then receive the uncollected money due to the fact that the subscription department will figure out how to make money on subscriptions. These people still have not gone anywhere and feel great. Although the share of paid subscriptions in the structure of operators' revenues has decreased, due to the fact that the mobile market has grown (many have more than one SIM card - in a modem, in a tablet), the budgets of content services are still large, and the scheme itself remains the same: “operator - aggregator is a small service”. Moreover, there are a certain number of people who subscribe to these "idiotic" services on their own. But the proportion between them and those who do not sign on their own is skewed towards those who did not know. But talking aboutthat only those who were deceived are sitting on a paid subscription, it is impossible.
- And who negotiates automatic subscriptions (when the subscriber was signed without his knowledge)? Aggregators with cellular operators?
- There are criteria for how much you can gesture. Operators should make sure that there are not too many calls. It is still necessary to comply with the policy, but there are periods when the indicators "burn": on New Year's Eve and at the end of quarters, the situation with subscriptions often worsens (this information was confirmed to us by one of the content services market participants, who asked not to be named - note. Daily Storm). Because it is a quick way to show money in accounts and control is weakened. Everyone knows about this: operators, aggregators, and services.
- How are sites that are subscribed to through aggregators created and operated? Many have such names that it is scary to drive them into the address bar.
- There are a bunch of ad networks that are rather frivolous about what code they advertise through them. There you can upload an ad code that works as a click and generate a subscription. There is still some gradation. Somewhere to subscribe, just press a button, this is a very thug option. Somewhere press the button and enter the code from the SMS. This is the so-called "weight" - if you have it hung, then your income simply drops by an order of magnitude. The operator hangs the weight - he can do it to the aggregator, and that to his partners, who are very gesturing to stay within the framework. There was a case when MTS decided to clean up a large aggregator, made monstrous fines, and the fraud fell by 50 percent. There people were divided into those whose loyalty the operator needed, and those who could be milked.and fought very hard to ban subscriptions for certain customers. That is, the "weight" can be hung on a specific client. Then for some subscribers the service will work through pressing, and for some - via SMS with a password.
- That is, everyone (operators, aggregators, services) is cooked in one pot and it is beneficial for everyone so that the situation remains stable. Does this system have a big external enemy?”“If you complain to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, then as soon as the proceedings reach the operator, he returns all the money. The money is returned, and the case is closed for lack of corpus delicti.
The Interior Ministry does not consider what is happening as theft of millions, although it would be worth it. If you complain to Rospotrebnadzor and the Federal Antimonopoly Service, then a document comes in, they say, now, in order to consider the complaint, you need to fulfill a number of points, but they are difficult to fulfill. The only structure that can help is judgment. If you correctly draw up a claim, then you can achieve that you get your money back. But that's all.
In our country, there are not so-called cumulative lawsuits: in the States there is such an institution when one person submits in the interests of an indefinite circle of persons, and other people who find themselves in a similar situation can easily join him.
Money for two
Telecommunications law expert Anton Bogatov told the Daily Storm that operators are using a loophole in the Civil Code: as a general rule, when you are silent, this does not mean that you agree to anything, only "unless otherwise provided by agreement of the parties." Operators are taking advantage of this opportunity.
- They like to say that the user has subscribed to some kind of content service. These services are provided not by the operator, but by third-party organizations. But the agreement between them cannot be called otherwise than an agreement on joint activities. According to it, the parties share the proceeds in some proportions, and sometimes the operator gets the most. And the operator is interested in the growth of revenue. In fact, this is a joint activity agreement.
According to Anton Bogatov, there are three types of subscriptions. The first is when a person voluntarily presses a button. The second is when a subscriber is provided with a free service for several months, for which they then begin to charge money. The third is outright fraud, when a person is signed without his knowledge.
“In my practice, there was a case when a person was bought a SIM card in order to operate a barrier in the yard, but the barrier unexpectedly subscribed to a bunch of content services,” recalls Anton Bogatov. - The operator says: "You pressed the buttons!" Who! Barrier? There are no civil cases on this topic, and if there are, then there are not many: the fact is that the sums are small.
An interviewee with the Daily Storm, a company offering satellite vehicle tracking services, confirmed that their GPS trackers also regularly subscribed to the service.
“We have a corporate agreement with MegaFon,” he said. - And an interesting situation turned out. At first, they charged us for using the services. Then they carried out some kind of fact-checking and returned a significant part of the funds.
This was repeated from month to month. Then we got tired of it: we took the details, studied it, and simply asked to set a limit on expenses of 1000 rubles per month. After that, they began to spend five times less on trackers.
One of the content services market participants explained that this is a standard practice for MegaFon when claims for subscriptions arise: the company prefers to return money to those who are indignant.
“In theory, the prosecutor’s office should deal with this, this is its function - to protect the interests of an indefinite circle of people,” Anton Bogatov believes. - It's the same with content services. If it turns out that the operator, together with the content provider, has come up with a system for the subscription of people who do not use this service and did not intend to, then this is a fraud - Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. But if I file a statement about a crime, the amount is small - the case will not be initiated.
On the other hand, the prosecutor's office can calculate how many actions of this kind have been committed, and there the threshold will be already higher. Why the prosecutor's office does not deal with this is a mystery to me.
According to Telecom Daily analyst Ilya Shatilin, most content providers are created by mobile operators as a means of additional income.
- They register for unknown persons and then somehow get carte blanche from operators in order to sell all kinds of subscriptions and other things. This business is flourishing, and the revenue is divided, relatively speaking, between the operator and the content provider 50-50. Both the operator makes a profit, and the manager who invented it. In fact, many of these companies are affiliated with operators.
Ilya Shatilin believes that almost all Russian operators are engaged in such a business: because only about 5% of subscribers complain about incorrect charges, the rest do not detect them, or they find them too late and simply turn off, but do not demand a refund.
- It all works because they know that people are too lazy to bother. At the same time, I have not seen operators highlight subscribed content in their reports as a separate line.
This is pale. Any journalist will see and write that the operator earned 600 million rubles in 2018 by deceiving subscribers. Therefore, everything is smeared as additional services. And among them there are useful ones, such as paying for parking by SMS. But the reports are all mixed up.
Inside view
The Daily Storm managed to talk not only with experts who observe the activities of aggregators and cellular operators from the outside, but also with those people who personally cooked in this kitchen.
Some have already left the content when, according to them, the market has become completely corrupt. Others try to survive and make money.
“In the 2000s, the content services market in Russia was structured differently,” the owner of one of the companies working in this area tells Daily Storm. He asked not to mention his name in the material. - First of all, the quality of the subscriptions was different: real games from big producers like Electronic Arts. Cellular operators paid partners enough to negotiate normal content with licensees.
Everything changed around 2011, he said. And the initiators of the changes were cellular companies.
- Firstly, deductions have decreased. Aggregators began to receive a lower percentage of the amount that subscribers pay when they subscribe to a particular service. And that entailed everything else. Companies were unable to buy normal expensive content that could be sold to subscribers. Many have left the market. Others began to cheat with subscriptions and trick subscribers to sites with low-quality videos, porn and games that no one needed.
As a source explains to the Daily Storm, these changes have given cellular companies room to manipulate. Favorable working conditions were created for friendly aggregators.
Others were treated harder.
According to him (they were fully confirmed by a representative of another company), the highest level of favor is a transparent banner. When a user finds himself on the site with which the aggregator works, the subscriber just needs to touch any point on the smartphone screen to subscribe.
The next level is banners for subscribing with the words "watch", "continue" and so on.
The main thing is not to "subscribe". This is one level below. The hardest part is when the aggregator is required to confirm the subscription via SMS.
“At first, there were two privileged partners:“Temafon”from“Beeline”and“I-Cube”from“MegaFon”,” continues the interlocutor of the Daily Storm. His information was confirmed to us by two more sources in the market.
Both of these companies were indirect participants in the scandal with the structures of VimpelCom in Spain (below we will tell you in detail about this case), covering which, the Spanish press linked Temafon with Vahe Yengibaryan (a businessman close to Alfa Group and Mikhail Fridman), and "Ay-Cube" - with Alexander Kolokoltsev, the son of the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia.
But in 2015, "Ay-Cube" stopped working. And with MegaFon, and in principle.
“From that moment on, there was no talk about the presence of Alexander Kolokoltsev on the market,” says a source to the Daily Storm. - Apparently, I found another lucrative area.
The position of the main partner of MegaFon did not remain vacant for long. The Tatarstan company "Informpartner" has entered the vacant niche (the story about it and the comments of the founder of this company can also be read below).
All market participants who agreed to communicate with the Daily Storm agree that it is impossible to take a dominant position without ties with the top management of the cellular company. However, they could not name any of the names among the management of MegaFon. Two people suggested that Informpartner could be associated with the ex-head of the Ministry of Communications (2012-2018), a native of Kazan, Nikolai Nikiforov (about how the family of the former minister “crossed paths” with the founders of Informpartner can also be read in the chapter devoted to this company).
- Not long before that - in 2014 - there was a repetition of the events of 2011, when the rules of the game changed and the percentage of low-quality content increased. The Duma passed a law according to which a subscriber can be subscribed to content only after making sure that he wants it. SMS confirmation was implied. After the adoption of the law, the volume of the content market fell sharply, but then everything returned. But for some, these strict rules have worked, but for others they have not.
To demonstrate the difference in approaches, one of the Daily Storm interlocutors showed a file with a table of indexes that illustrate all the nuances of the interaction of the aggregator with the operator. Among others, there is a subscriber complaints rate. If their number exceeds the permissible threshold, the operator penalizes the aggregator and for the first time deprives subscribers of the opportunity to subscribe for four days. If history repeats itself several times, then it completely breaks off relations with the aggregator. And again, he fines.
- "Informpartner" itself sends such reports to aggregators.
Not the operator, but he.
The diagram of relationships in the content services market that is currently in effect is best illustrated by the following diagram.
At the very top is the mobile operator. Below it is an aggregator, companies that are exactly engaged in selling content services. Below are the owners of sites with porn, games, videos and horoscopes that GPS trackers sometimes subscribe to. They receive money from aggregators. And the bottom link is the subscribers, they pay for everything.
- But at the level between aggregates and sites there is one very important layer - CPA-grids (Cost Per Action or "cost per action", an advertising model with payment for user clicks. - Note. Daily Storm), - specifies the source of the Daily Storm. - It is they who bring traffic, that is, subscribers, to sites with content. Without their services, not a single aggregator can now work. The main CPA network operating in Russia is Golden Goose (and there will be a story about them too).
The most acceptable working conditions for aggregators, according to our interlocutors, are offered by Beeline:
- They give partners 45% of what the subscriber pays. MTS, when engaged in content, gave 20-25%. "MegaFon" pays "Informpartner" 50%, and from them (other aggregators already conclude an agreement with them) at the exit receive from 10 to 27%, depending on the agreement.
In the 2010s, sources told the Daily Storm, there were two powerful ways to enter the aggregator market. First: negotiate with privileged partners.
Second: buy an operating company with a communication license and an already signed contract with one or more operators and hope that you will not be ousted.
- In "Beeline", in principle, it was formally possible to enter from scratch. They demonstrate openness, - says the source of the Daily Storm. - But waiting for an agreement could calmly drag on for up to 10 months.
Oksana Pankratova, partner at AC&M Consulting, spoke about the volume of the content services market to the Daily Storm.
- In 2017, the volume was 37.7 billion rubles, in 2018 - already 29.2 billion.
The Daily Storm and its participants spoke about the shrinking market. Many content companies have made the decision to retire in recent years.
The disclosure of revenue for most large companies in the market is dated 2017. Then the largest turnover was demonstrated by Informpartner - 4 billion rubles. If you take a closer look at the financial indicators of the aggregators, you will notice that the difference between income and expenses is minimal.
“Perfectly normal practice,” confirms the Daily Storm source. - Usually costs are easily drawn through advertising costs.
According to our interlocutors, most operators continue to make money on the content services market (there was no consensus on MTS: some argued that the company had stopped subscriptions after the tax scandal, others that they had simply significantly reduced the amount of content) and even Tele2.
According to Oksana Pankratova from AC&M Consulting, among mobile operators, MegaFon has the largest share in the content services market, followed by Beeline and third by MTS.