WWW.NNOV.RU, WWW.NNOV.ORG, "NNOV" — an information and entertainment Web portal on the geographic domain of Nizhny Novgorod Region. It is also available at the domain NNOV.ORG (organizational).
Nature of the Phenomenon
Historically, the second-level domain nnov.ru is the official domain of the Nizhny Novgorod Region, and www.nnov.ru is one of the oldest and most original websites of the Nizhny Novgorod Region's internet. Since 1996, the portal has united active residents of the region who take an interest in the urban environment, publishing news, TV listings, and personal opinions of Nizhny Novgorod residents.
Owing to these circumstances, content on NNOV typically carries a high Citation Index. Information published at addresses of the form NNOV.RU\Your_page is flagged by leading Russian and international search engines as particularly significant.
The site's motto, unchanged for the past 15 years, is: "NNOV.RU — a site for Nizhny Novgorod residents."
Street Panoramas
On 29 December 2009, the portal launched its own street panorama service: more than ten thousand interconnected panoramas of streets and squares in Nizhny Novgorod, available at www.nnov.ru/pano/. It was one of the first urban panorama services in Russia. The launch announcement specifically noted that each panorama could be linked to and shared with a friend or posted in a blog — "making it possible for the first time to 'cite' a specific vantage point in Nizhny Novgorod" (launch announcement).
The panoramas stopped working while the portal was still active: in April 2011, readers were posting comments under the announcement saying the service would not load. Stitching glitches that turned cars and passers-by into impossible figures were collected in the Panorama Artifacts" gallery.
Traffic
At present, WWW.NNOV.RU reaches more than 270,000 unique visitors per month, given that the total number of internet users in Nizhny Novgorod is 300,000 people. The daily audience exceeds 20,000 unique visitors. 90% of the audience are Nizhny Novgorod residents. The site holds 15th place in the Cities and Regions ranking.
Statistics source: http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/nnov_ru/
In the .ORG Zone
According to the company, WWW.NNOV.RU is creating a mirror of the site in the .ORG zone; accordingly, since December 2010 a temporary technical redirect of its services to that domain has been in place.
Two Domains: Why NNOV Lives in Two Zones
The domain nnov.ru was registered on 23 October 1996 and remains one of the oldest in the region. The portal grew out of resources assembled at a single address by a Nizhny Novgorod internet provider, and by 2003–2004 had drawn level in audience size with its main competitor, NN.RU. Around the same time, NNOV was spun off from the provider as a separate legal entity, and according to an account by Ilya Osipov, one of NN.RU's founders, the competitor's owners acquired a controlling stake in it: negotiations were conducted by an acquaintance of theirs who presented himself as an investor from a Moscow company. After that, both portals operated independently, and few people in the city knew about the deal (founder's account).
The second domain, nnov.org, was registered on October 21, 2007. From December 2010, the portal's services began redirecting to it; the company described this at the time as a mirror and a temporary technical redirect. Temporary it was not: as early as February 2011, the nnov.ru address began returning a permanent redirect, and the portal's content moved definitively to the .ORG zone.
The denouement came in 2012, when the business was sold to the publishing house Hearst Shkulev Media (the founder's account). After that, the two addresses went their separate ways for good. Today nnov.ru is home to a Nizhny Novgorod web studio that has no connection to the former portal — it is visible in the web archive from at least September 2022. The portal itself remained at nnov.org: it still loads, but its most recent content is dated 2014. As a result, the two halves of a single project now look like two entirely different websites — and accounts of "NNOV" point now to one address, now to the other.
Editorial email address
Advertising on the site
NNOV portal advertising department
See also
Encyclopedia research: Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet based on counter.nn.ru rating data.