Rambler Media Group is a technology company that owns the search engine Rambler and the news portals Gazeta.ru and Lenta.ru. The company previously owned a number of other media outlets, including Afisha, Championat, WMJ.ru, Secret Mag, and LiveJournal. Some of these operations were discontinued. Additionally, Rambler owns a digital advertising sales platform and an online ticketing platform.
Media assets
News portals: Lenta.ru, Gazeta.ru
State Media Matrix Typology: Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu)
Ownership and governance
Rambler is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Russian state-owned banking group Sberbank. Sberbank initially acquired a controlling interest in the group, representing over 46% of the total shares, in 2019. One year later, the company increased its stake in Rambler to 100%.
Source of funding and budget
Rambler Media Group’s primary source of revenue is advertising. Nevertheless, the bank provides substantial financial backing for a significant portion of the editorial operations. Nevertheless, there is no evidence to suggest that in excess of 50% of the company’s annual income is derived from state subsidies.
Editorial independence
Over the past eight years, the owners of Rambler Media Group have increasingly exerted pressure on the journalists working for the group’s media outlets, whose editorial agenda had been aligned with the Kremlin’s orders. In 2014, Alexander Mamut, the Russian oligarch who owned the group until its sale to Sberbank, terminated Galina Timchenko’s employment as chief editor at Lenta.ru. The reason for this was her coverage of articles that had not been approved by the Kremlin. In response, the Lenta newsroom submitted a collective resignation.
It appears that the sale of the group to Sberbank, which occurred in 2019-2020, was initiated by a request from the Kremlin, which at some point lost confidence in Mamut.
In recent years, media outlets operated by Rambler Media Group, particularly Lenta.ru and Gazeta.ru, have increasingly become vehicles for Kremlin-aligned propaganda, according to insights from Russian media analysts interviewed for this report in March 2023.
To date, no domestic statute or mechanism of independent assessment or oversight has been identified that validates the editorial independence of Rambler’s media outlets.
September 2024