There are many dark spots in this story.
In particular, it looks strange that VK's main shareholders, Pavel Durov (12%) and Mail.ru Group (39.9%), were not notified in advance of a possible deal in which the sellers — VK executive director Lev Leviev (8%) and co-founder Vyacheslav Mirilashvili (40%) — were selling their stakes to the buyer, the investment fund United Capital Partners. However, despite the lack of information about the course of the negotiations, the deal amount and the real names of VK's new shareholders, one can still try to make some forecasts about what future awaits VKontakte in the coming years.
The secrecy of the process makes it impossible to analyze this deal. We can only put forward theories about what actually happened and what it might lead to. That is why everything written below is merely speculation, not analysis. I would like to highlight a few things that deserve particular attention.
Factor one. Businesses have realized the value of personal data. Today, a child who has not yet been born is already in three or four databases, and after the birth the parents post the child's personal data (photos, name, age, habits) on social networks for all to see. Teenagers and adults do it themselves. Society does not yet have a culture of handling personal information (not only in the CIS, but worldwide), nor are there reliable technical means of countering the collection of personal data. I think these issues will be regulated at the global level in a year or two, but by then a body of personal information sufficient to analyze the behavior of internet users and work with them will already have been collected.
This information is needed, first of all, by businesses (marketers and advertisers). It is used to build a consumer profile and create products for that consumer, and then to run information campaigns through personalized advertising. Today this process is far from perfect, but in the future the methods of collecting and delivering information will become so advanced that people will not be able to tell when they made a decision on their own and when they gave in to manipulative technologies. This cannot be compared with modern advertising; in terms of its impact on the user, it is closer to brainwashing by the secret services. The same technologies can also be used in politics. The Arab revolutions, during which the influence of social networks and internet tools on the spread of information was tested for the first time, are only the embryo of future information wars.
In other words, control over a network as large as VK benefits both business and government bodies — it is part of a global process. And if we are talking about a country where business is intertwined with the state, then…
The world is changing. While today the most important thing for an internet resource is to monetize its traffic, very soon far more money will be made by selling user data. So putting money into a social network of this scale is a good investment in any case — provided, that is, that the network keeps developing. And this is where it gets interesting.
Factor two. All known attempts to manage IT businesses through government agencies or non-core investors (usually linked to government agencies) have failed. Let me give two striking examples. The first is Rambler, which "fell" after non-professional investors came in (they took complete control of the company). The second is Yandex, which keeps developing dynamically because it is run by its own founders. The state has the ability to absorb VK entirely, either directly or through commercial entities that depend on it. But what would it do with the company next? This is not a natural resources business, where the resources aren't going anywhere. What matters here is intellectual capital (the number of IT specialists and their expertise), not buildings, servers, cars or anything else. From my business experience: IT people cannot be forced to work under duress, nor do they work "just for the money." We have had many cases where people moved from one project to another (with worse funding) simply because they found it more interesting.
Given the above, it is logical to assume that buying such a large stake in the company was a careful, well-planned move by entities close to the state or by big business. On the one hand, they gained a tool for influencing the social network's founder; on the other, the founder retained the ability and the motivation to develop it as his own business. In other words, the likelihood of a full merger or takeover is low.
But the new investors should act extremely carefully. The very secrecy of the share purchase could not but affect the company's founder psychologically. There is a risk that if the new partners make the wrong moves (for example, by applying excessive pressure), he and his team will simply turn around and leave for the EU or the US, where specialists of this caliber are welcomed with open arms. In that case, VK's future would be in doubt, given the competition from Odnoklassniki, Moi Mir, Facebook and others. For the investors, "crushing" Durov and his team would be the same as destroying their own business, into which they have invested a lot of money.