Results 2021: Pavel Ryakkonen from WN Media Group on the main thing for the year

We continue to summarize the results of 2021 together with top managers and experts of the gaming industry (and related ones). Next up is an interview with Pavel Ryakkonen, founder and CEO of WN Media Group.

How did 2021 go for the company?

This year we have made several big steps that have set the vector of the company’s development for many years to come.

We have “placed our flags” in the regions where we plan to be present and actively develop: we have held large conferences in Russia, China and the USA, as well as online events in Canada and Latin America. Although the latter were held in a digital format, they were primarily focused on their regions. This was evident both in the audience and in the languages of the event.

Business movements for obvious reasons are now difficult. It will probably take time for everything to recover or get into some more understandable channel. That’s why we ourselves came this year to those countries where the gaming industry is strong. At the same time, we have been developing our WN Hub communication platform all year, thanks to which our events can be attended online.

Next year we will continue to move in both directions: we will move towards new markets for us (for example, in the spring of 2022 we will hold WN offline in Istanbul) and improve the platform.

We are also actively engaged in a line of conferences with an educational bias — Talents in Games. The last one was recently held in Moscow. We plan to hold the next one in spring in Kiev.

WN Media Group is an infrastructure media company. In the gaming industry, we are engaged not only in events, which are probably the most noticeable outside. We are also doing a lot of work on the development of our recruitment agency. This year we have significantly strengthened the staff of recruiters, created a cool team that successfully cooperates with leading companies, so if you need personnel (and who doesn’t need them now?), come.

Our media direction is represented by b2b publications App2Top.ru (in Russian) and Game World Observer (in English). Over the year, the coverage of both publications has grown, as have the views. For example, monthly views from App2Top.ru they have doubled since the beginning of the year.

The growth of metrics is good. However, it is important to remember here that b2b is often not about huge reach, but about the quality of the audience. You don’t need a lot here, you need quality. We are working in this direction. Plus, next year we will try interactive formats of working with the audience.

By the way, since we’re talking about the media. Launched this year’s award App2Top.ru Awards (we summed up its results just the other day). We received a lot of positive feedback. We will continue to develop this initiative next year.

In general, the year turned out to be important, eventful and difficult.