Yandex Set to Acquire eLama Advertising Platform in 2024

In a strategic move to bolster its advertising capabilities, Yandex, a leading Russian technology company, has announced plans to acquire the eLama advertising service technology platform by the summer of 2024. This acquisition, pending all necessary approvals, marks a significant step in Yandex’s efforts to enhance its digital marketing services. Although the transaction amount remains undisclosed, the announcement has sparked interest in the tech and marketing communities about the potential synergies between Yandex and eLama.

eLama, known for its comprehensive tools for setting up, placing, and optimizing online advertising campaigns, has established itself as a key player in the digital advertising space. The platform supports advertising across 19 systems, including Yandex Direct, VKontakte, Avito, and even offers radio advertising options. It caters primarily to small and medium-sized businesses, small advertising agencies, and private advertising specialists, providing official advertising in Telegram Ads, native integrations with bloggers, a service exchange, and a marketplace of free tools for business promotion.

The acquisition process, initially expected to conclude in the summer of 2022, encountered delays. According to Ekaterina Kondratyeva, PR director of eLama, a mix of market factors necessitated adjustments to the technical and legal aspects of the deal, ultimately preserving its core while extending the timeline for completion to mid-2024. Despite these delays, eLama is set to continue operating under its existing brand and team, ensuring that clients maintain access to all current platform tools.

This transaction promises to provide eLama with enhanced opportunities for growth and expansion by leveraging Yandex’s advanced technologies. The platform aims to continue its collaboration with existing partners while attracting new ones, ensuring a diverse range of effective advertising venues for users. Importantly, eLama assures that the cost of tools and services will remain unchanged for both existing and new customers, with any pricing adjustments only occurring as part of planned product developments.

Yandex’s decision to acquire eLama aligns with its broader strategy to diversify and strengthen its suite of digital marketing solutions. By integrating eLama’s expertise and services, Yandex is poised to offer an even more comprehensive advertising ecosystem to businesses and marketing professionals, reinforcing its position as a dominant force in the digital marketing landscape.

As both companies prepare for the transition, the digital marketing community eagerly anticipates the innovative solutions and opportunities that this partnership will bring to the forefront, further enriching the advertising options available to businesses of all sizes.

 

Dan Taylor is the founder and editor of International Search Insights (ISI), the publication behind ReadIsi, and a Partner and Head of Innovation (Search & AI) at SALT.agency. He has worked in search for more than a decade, in-house and agency-side, and is regarded as one of the West’s leading voices on search engines beyond Google, including Yandex, Baidu, Naver and Cốc Cốc. On ReadIsi, Dan covers the engines and AI answer platforms that English-language coverage tends to miss: Baidu and ERNIE, Yandex and Alice AI, Naver, Cốc Cốc, Shenma, Sogou, WeChat and Weibo search, plus DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen. He also keeps dated records of documented changes, such as the Yandex, Baidu and Naver algorithm update histories and the DeepSeek, ERNIE and Qwen model update histories. His approach is to take learnings from global search engines and apply logic with a high evidence threshold. A claim needs a source, patterns seen in one market are treated as a hypothesis until they are checked in another, and where the evidence is thin he says so. For brands, that means advice built on what can be shown, with measurement that separates being cited from being chosen. Dan is credited with coining the term “edge SEO” and won the inaugural TechSEO Boost research competition in 2018 for his work on CDN and edge changes for SEO. In 2026 he was credited with coining “Infinite Tail” to describe how keyword research is changing with AI search. He is the author of AI Search Marketing For The Travel Sector, writes for Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land and Travel Marketing Guy, and has advised technology, SaaS, travel and enterprise ecommerce brands, including Cloudflare, GitLab and Airbnb. He has given multiple talks and panels at the International Search Summit in Barcelona, and has also spoken at Optimization Moscow, brightonSEO, Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia in Bangkok, Athens SEO and the Asia SEO Virtual Summit 2026, where his talk looked at how Baidu, Naver, DeepSeek, Tencent, Cốc Cốc and Yandex built their own AI answers.