Mikhail (Alexandrovich) Iosilevich (popularly I.O.Silevich, I.O., MIO) — a leading Nizhny Novgorod Facebook blogger, public figure, businessman and political patron. He is known to the general public mainly as the ideologist of socially oriented Nizhny Novgorod e-business. Co-owner (1999-2013) of the largest and most successful regional internet company "NN.RU", director, moderator of the public forums.
Advisor to the president of the company "InterMediaGroup" (Hearst Shkulev Media publishing house), member of the Board of Directors of NNRU, honorary moderator of the NN.RU forums (since February 2013)
Elder of the first convocation of the Nizhny Novgorod Marketers' Club. Bankruptcy trustee.
Owner of the ACC Modeling Agency.
The only lawful representative of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the Nizhny Novgorod Region (a participant of the Pastafarian congress in Moscow).
Favourite saying: “Making things complicated is simple; making them simple is complicated” (Albert Einstein).
Notable sayings
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According to a press release from the internet company, NN.RU director Mikhail Iosilevich noted: "We all know that the phrase "politicians lie" is a firmly established reflection of reality in people's minds. | 
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"Birzha.ru". "I have more respect for people who stick with one thing for at least 5-10 years"
Interview conducted by Tatyana Kokina-Slavina:
— Mikhail, the nn.ru project launched in 1999. So it turns out that after defending your diploma you never worked a single day "for the man". Was nobody hiring, or did you simply not want to?
— I did work "for the man" while I was at university. First I sold cassettes and CDs at the "Lazer" counters, then a bit of cars and a bit of internet projects. The last of those inspired me more than the rest, since that market was only just emerging and there were a great many free niches. Do whatever you want! An excellent opportunity for self-fulfilment.
Together with Ilya Osipov we set up the company NNRU and hired our first employees — Andrey Shaposhnikov and Lyosha Pavlov. Oleg Kosmachyov from TSS helped us with valuable advice, and not only advice. We settled into an office belonging to Ilya's father. And my father gave us our first business development loan — 1,000 dollars. I remember paying him back 100 dollars a month.
— Did you suspect back then that this was a promising business, or were you running the portal as entertainment?
— Both! I thought then, and I still think now, that online media are far more promising than the rest. From the very beginning we aimed at breaking even. Even so, the approach was not as harsh as in "serious" business. The site's visitors always came first.
— And when did the profit start coming in, if it's not a secret?
— In the early years the profit was entirely reinvested in the business. At first we only drew a salary, like all the employees. When did it become possible to take part of the money as profit? Probably not before 2004.
— Do you have any "idols" among the well-known computer people?
— No. All these "idols" often abandon what they started halfway through, and the resources fold after a while. Or they drift from project to project, working on their personal image. I have more respect for people who stick with one thing for at least 5-10 years. People like Misha Gurevich from RBC or German Klimenko from LiveInternet. You can see that leaving their brainchild would not be easy for them.
— Don't you feel a certain fatigue with the project? 12 years, after all...
— I have thought about it. I plan to "retire" in about two or three years.
— Would you sell the resource if you were offered good money?
— A lot depends on who does the offering. I will not sell anything to the authorities (of any kind), because that would kill the project. But private investment would only do good.
— Are you plotting anything new? Perhaps in a completely different field?
— I'm not plotting anything yet, but I believe the internet will soon see a new redivision of spheres of influence and of the market. A "new Google" or a "new Facebook" is bound to appear and take over the whole world. Maybe it will be nn.ru. (Laughs.)
— What makes nn.ru special compared with the portals of other cities?
— Our forums, of course. We now have, I think, close to three hundred of them. There are professional ones, interest-based ones, ones by place of residence, and ones simply for socialising. And there are more and more of them.
— Does it take a big team to run such a behemoth?
— nn.ru has about 20 employees. And roughly 300 moderators.
— And you pay them all?
— The moderators work on a voluntary basis. How do I motivate them? I won't tell. If they want to, they'll tell you themselves.
— Not long ago the governor invited the resource's leading bloggers over for a cup of tea. Why do you think he did that?
— The governor generally does a lot of things that are incomprehensible and outlandish to me as an ordinary citizen.
— To my mind it couldn't be clearer. nn.ru has simply become a social and political force, and the authorities have grasped that.
— I sincerely hope that nn.ru influences people somehow — at least a little — for the better. But in general it is a myth that the media can incline anyone towards anything. It cannot. But shedding light on life from different angles and presenting different points of view — that's easy.
— The "stars" of nn.ru — who are they? How did they become stars?
— At present 25,000 people write actively on nn.ru. That is our core. There are "stars" who have added a lot of people as friends.
— But then they turn out to be "inflated" stars...
— So far there is no absolute numerical measure of "stardom". You can be a star on the "Flirting. Love. Dating" forum, on the blondes' forum or on a professional forum — these are very different things. Sometimes the quality of those who consider you a star matters more than their number.
— Forum members send you black marks and are virtually cheeky to you — by all appearances they don't tremble before you. Have you ever made use of your official position and banned someone?
— I have. I didn't repent. If what I had done was later recognised as a mistake, I corrected it. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes — that's normal.
— I often read your posts. You take an active civic stance, you are not shy about stating it, and you do not suppress — indeed, you even support! — displays of "dissent" among your users. Aren't you afraid something unpleasant might happen to the portal?
— I hope it will not come to that.
— Still: is there a plan for saving nn.ru in that case?
— It is easier for online media to be independent than for anyone else — moving to external hosting is fairly easy. And everyone knows it.
— Have you ever been threatened? Along the lines of: take down such-and-such a topic or else?
— Not once.
— And if such a conversation did take place?
— Well, it's very hard to imagine right now how heroically I would answer, where I would tell them to go. Nobody knows how it would really turn out. But I would react somehow, of course.
— Has anyone ever demanded that you disclose users' personal data?
— By law the police have the right to do so. But they use it very rarely. Apparently they have enough other things to do.
— They say FSB people sit on the forum. Do you think that's true? And do those in power drop by?
— I think they do sit there and do drop by. If the audience is already over a million a month, then among that million every profession is surely represented.
— You probably know the ins and outs of all the leading forum members. Is the user Bulavinov" really our former mayor? And other well-known figures?
— Yes, that's him. At any rate, his face is visible in his video blog. Incidentally, he also came to the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet this year. Kondrashov, they say, often reads nn.ru. But only a few people are registered under their real names. I am one of them.
— How much time do you spend online yourself?
— At least a few hours a day on nn.ru. I'm also on Facebook and VKontakte. I drop in there for five minutes.
— Are you a big fan of all sorts of "devices" and "gadgets"?
— An average fan. Not to the point of fanaticism. I used to be a more technical person. Now I pay more attention to the emotional side. Thinking about the soul, so to speak.
— Some entrepreneurs, especially of the old school, underestimate the importance of the internet. Can one be successful in business today while scorning "new technologies"?
— Most of the small and medium-sized business that used to develop in Nizhny Novgorod is now, unfortunately, crushed. Monopolies and state corporations, on the other hand, are thriving. And there you can manage without the internet, and without brains altogether. The main thing is to honour the "masters". In normal competitive business, of course, you cannot do without online advertising and marketing.
— What, in your view, is holding the Runet back? What new things would you write into the laws? What does the internet need to be protected (cleansed) from?
— It's the laws I would protect it from! The internet already has all the laws it needs. They are based on self-regulation and freedom of choice. The greedy little hands of Russian deputies are reaching out for the internet, of course. But whatever laws they invent, those laws will only apply on the territory of the Russian Federation, that is, effectively only inside their own heads. And the internet has lived by its own laws and will go on doing so.
— Are you really aiming to become an oligarch?
— Well, I do want to be an oligarch. (Laughs.) It's a question of motivation. You have to set yourself big goals; they are easier not to miss. All the more so since in the popular mind one or two million dollars already makes you an "oligarch".
Tatyana Kokina-Slavina, Birzha No. 4, 7 February 2012
"Delovoy Kvartal". Mikhail Iosilevich: The internet business— is an open game
Delovoy Kvartal 10.10.2011 04:00
The capital of the Volga Region is home to more than 20 well-known brands. For the most part, "made in Nizhny Novgorod" can be said of large industrial enterprises such as GAZ, PAZ, VMZ and Nizhpharm. Against the background of these industrial giants the names of internet companies do not yet sound quite as loud, but locally they are as well known as the federal ones.
The internet business— is an open game
Today NN.RU is one of the most recognisable brands of Nizhny Novgorod; its logo can be found on discount cards and on cars. The portal recently announced a competition for the best brand of Nizhny Novgorod. According to Mikhail Iosilevich, one of the creators of NN.RU, a brand must perform two functions. First, it must attract tourists to Nizhny Novgorod. It should carry an emotional message and a clear positioning of the city. Foreigners, for example, often confuse us with Novgorod or Nizhny Tagil, while Muscovites consistently call the residents of Nizhny "Novgorodians". Second, the brand is needed by the residents of Nizhny Novgorod themselves.
— It should contain the answers to the questions of who we are and where we are going. Khokhloma is not suited to that. It is unwise to keep sliding back into the Middle Ages and pushing the Kremlin towers to the foreground. Nizhny Novgorod is, above all, a city of clever people. We have many institutes and research enterprises, we build aircraft, submarines, ships. A great many companies here are engaged in modern programming. Incidentally, it was precisely in our region that the first atomic bomb was built, and yet we put the emphasis on khokhloma. I propose making a brand that will not send us and the city's guests back into the distant past, but will inspire pride in present and future achievements.
Beyond competition
In the 1990s a wave of internet business swept over England and the USA. Hundreds of companies appeared whose activity developed entirely online. The so-called dot-coms only managed to "take off" in 2004. GOOGLE, Amazon, MSN and AOL "seized" virtual reality. Russia produced its own counterparts — Yandex, Mail — which laid the foundation for the development of dot-coms in the regions. Mikhail Iosilevich and his partner registered NN.RU LLC in 1999. At that time few people in Nizhny Novgorod had access to the Internet, and the idea that one could "make money" on it would have been considered utopian.
How did the idea of creating NN.RU come about?
— My partner Ilya Osipov and I met in 1999 and immediately decided that we needed to create something of our own. The idea of developing a business online seemed to us the most interesting, because we had knowledge that we were able to put into practice. I graduated from the faculty of computational mathematics, and my partner from the economics faculty. Nevertheless, the duties of solving business matters — finding advertisers, establishing the necessary contacts and promoting the brand — I had to take upon myself. Ilya took on the technical side of the matter: developing the site and providing its content. To this day the business is divided between us in equal parts.
Why did you choose the world wide web as a platform for developing a business?
— At the end of the 1990s the Internet was far more interesting than it is today; it was only beginning to turn into a business platform. We were drawn by the specific nature of the market itself: on the one hand it was completely new and no one really knew how to work with it, and on the other it required only small investments to develop. Were there no competitors at all back then?
— There were fewer of them than now, because many were afraid to invest money in the Internet. Nevertheless, city websites appeared one after another. We launched at the same time as several competitors whom no one remembers any more. But at that time we were waging a genuine struggle for the internet audience and for digital space. Now the internet advertising market is divided up, and in order to create new sites and make them popular one needs far more money than 12 years ago.
And how much did promoting the site cost you?
— I cannot name the exact sum, but I am sure that beginning businessmen would have to invest 1000 times more money in a similar project than we did at that time. And in general money is not the determining factor here; what matters is a set of parameters taken together: entrepreneurial talent, character, flexibility of mind. Internet business is an open game where everyone sees everything. Like chess: you cannot hide aces up your sleeve — you play with intellect alone.
NN.RU is known to the Nizhny Novgorod audience above all as a forum; the other projects are secondary. Why was it this format that interested you?
— The calculation was to create a certain information space in which everyone could express their opinion and share their experience regardless of sex, age or social status. On the forum everyone communicates under "nicknames", without giving real first and last names: this makes the communication unprejudiced. Forum participants are not afraid to contradict their bosses; here everyone is equal. I think it was precisely the possibility of free communication that gave NN.RU its traffic and made the brand well known.
Was it easy for you to promote the brand at the formative stage?
— We used every available route of promotion: for the first five to seven years we invested all the money we earned into advertising and ran PR campaigns of various kinds. We started out by pasting leaflets with information about our site on lampposts ourselves and talking about the project at various technical gatherings. We did not have enough money to buy outdoor advertising boards and pages in popular magazines.
NN.ru or Yandex?
Today, according to Mikhail Iosilevich, the audience of NN.RU doubles every year. 12 years ago Internet users were mainly programmers and IT specialists; the general public caught up only four years ago. In order to remain first, we had to adapt to the audience.
— In 1999 the Nizhny Novgorod internet audience consisted, conventionally speaking, of 1000 people, and among those thousand we were the leaders. When every housewife gained access to the network, we had to broaden the range of topics in order to keep our primacy. Businessmen and politicians keep blogs on NN.RU, professional forums have been created. Besides, people have already grown used to working with our platform, to our design. Now competitors are creating similar products on various subjects, but people go to NN.RU out of habit.
Do you consider yourselves a company strong enough to compete on equal terms with the federal players?
— Here — yes. Our main competitors for the Nizhny Novgorod audience are the services of federal companies such as Yandex and Mail.ru. It is they who own large chunks of the local audience. And to this day we cannot say unequivocally what the residents of Nizhny Novgorod prefer more — Yandex or NN.RU.
Are you planning to expand the product line under your brand, for example to create an online store?
— More likely no than yes. There is such a thing as brand dilution. In order to create a new type of business, there has to be an understanding of the market. As far as developing internet projects is concerned, we are among the best in the city, but we have no experience of working in retail, because it lies outside the sphere of our professional interests.
If an offer came in to sell the project, how much would you value it at?
— The brand makes up 90% of the value of the whole business, which we value at 140 million roubles. Moreover, we have had the opportunity to sell it at that price. If buyers were ready to pay that money, then that is the market price of the business.
Do you want to sell the portal?
— People are not eternal and they want to get the maximum benefit from their project. In the end any business is created in order to be sold.
Made in Nizhny Novgorod
Mikhail Iosilevich is convinced that a brand exists on its own and that even the owner cannot always control its development. There are brands created to a high standard that are not popular with people, and conversely there are logos knocked together "in haste" that have earned popular recognition. If a person, glancing at a logo, can immediately describe in a couple of words what the company does and what product it makes, then the project can be considered a success.
Can one say that NN.RU is a "people's" brand?
— In the city the emblem of the NN.RU car forum is stuck on roughly 10 thousand cars, and this is not a PR stunt. The drivers themselves came up with this initiative, in order to recognise "their own kind" on the road. Is that not a sign that the brand belongs to the people? Besides, the portal has long lived a life of its own; new services appear here initiated by residents of Nizhny Novgorod. For example, it was not we who came up with the "Joint Purchase" forum. It is run by a group of moderators who are not connected with NN.RU. Another sign of the brand's "popular" character is the thousands of people who found work with our help, acquired business partners, mastered new technologies. They feel an emotional bond with NN.RU.
Have you thought about developing a new project or entering other regions with NN.RU?
— We have no pretensions to world domination; it is unlikely that the NN.RU brand would take root anywhere other than Nizhny Novgorod. Over the years of working in the development and promotion of internet projects we have understood one thing: all the regions of our country are different, and what goes well in one will be of no interest at all in another. We lost two years of our lives on creating a similar site for Moscow. An investor became interested in the project and wanted to put money into it, and we had to move there to work. After some time the investor himself wanted to run the site, without our support. And after a while the project came to nothing. That experience gave us an understanding that every city has its own specific character. At the moment we are trying to develop the projects Dzerzhinsk.ru and Vladimir.ru. The first is doing better, the second is going a little harder. The thing is that business requires constant control and presence on the spot.
The story of the restriction of access to NN.RU
At the beginning of April 2017 a scandal flared up on the forum over the substitution of the password of the user Korvin, who complained to Mikhail Iosilevich as a moderator of the forums, and to the police.
2 April 2017
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Abuse of official position and "loss of face". Elena Khromova was unable to withstand Korvin's persistent attempts to discuss the real reasons for appointing a "rich kid" as moderator of the car forum. Korvin had long grown used to bans, but recently his nickname on NN.RU was hacked and the password changed. Only one person could have done this, and she does not deny her involvement — Elena Khromova. |
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3 April 2017
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Curs like Mikhail Iosilevich will now start barking about what a terrible country we live in. We live in a great country, but we have allowed the existence of people who egg others on, incite them and call for violence. Homemade bombs have gone off? Perhaps we should pay closer attention to such calls? |
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A curious finale for the project. This is, perhaps, a fitting boundary line for the NN.RU that we know and that knows us.
One founder is in San Francisco, the other is banned. Shoved out by the neck, to one degree or another, by the forces of anonymised fools who have long arms, a cool head and not a drop of courage. Very Russian. |
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Interesting facts
- Personally moderates the NN.RU forums.
- In the 2004 elections to the State Duma he stood for the party "Yabloko without Yavlinsky".
- Favourite book: "Omon Ra" by Viktor Pelevin.
- Laughed for more than 10 minutes after acquainting himself with Razgonoplan (Boost-Plane) in September 2010.
- His user number on NN.RU is number twelve.
- Handed over a lens worth 6 thousand roubles [1] (archive) , smashed by an OMON officer at a pro-democracy rally, to the head of the Nizhny Novgorod police, Colonel Shmonin, and also gave him headphones, so that he could listen to his favourite music through them when the occasion arose, rather than through the special loudspeakers that keep protesters from speaking [2] (archive) . "The lens cost some 6 grand - that sum is not significant for me. but the OMON officer who broke it showed professional unfitness and that realisation (which has now become obvious to him and to his superiors) - I think that is significant."