As reported by Vedomosti, the Ministry of Digital Industry proposes to oblige Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and other foreign companies to pay to the budgetary system of the Russian Federation “tax for Russian bloggers from advertising revenue”.
The Ministry’s proposal is set out in the plan for the development of the information technology industry in Russia. The corresponding federal law is planned to be prepared by the middle of this year. The document says that this step will lead to an increase in revenues from the activities of Russian bloggers to the budget. The executors of the project are the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Economic Development and the Federal Tax Service.
According to BloggerBase, video bloggers in Russia earned about 18 billion rubles last year. The pandemic has spurred an increase in demand for content and advertising on the Internet, in particular through social media.
Integration of advertising messages into blogging content is a comprehensive and effective tool that advertisers are willing to use, but social media marketing today looks like a fragmented “Wild West” – this market is still emerging. Blogging platforms and production centers publish figures that differ significantly: the range is from 2.4 billion to 18 billion rubles. in 2020. All approaches and assessments are of interest, but require verification and an agreed methodology for assessing the market.
Boris Omelnitsky, President of the IAB Russia Interactive Advertising Association.
Bloggers who order advertising from foreign companies receive money for a dollar card or a ruble bank account. According to Andrey Petropolskiy, director of the legal company Jurvista, the bank and the tax authorities do not consider such a payment to be commercial. If the amount does not exceed 500,000 rubles, then no one is interested in it and does not track where it came from.
It is difficult to say exactly how much money the state loses in this way, but it can be assumed that this is billions of rubles annually, since more than half of advertising has already moved to the Internet, and the Internet is the platform where bloggers are the main market players.
Andrey Petropolsky
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