Define crappy? Biglion has huuuge traffic (alexa #723 as we speak) and it's now arguably coupon service #1 in Russia. Moreover, the problems its customers might

Define crappy? Biglion has huuuge traffic (alexa #723 as we speak) and it's now arguably coupon service #1 in Russia. Moreover, the problems its customers might have with this site do not revolve around its design being similar to that of Groupon. The nature of the internet is that there is usually only one global winner. Compare worldwide search (Google is bigger than everybody else combined) with worldwide car makers (10+ big names of comparable size, local brands in many countries). That one global winner tends to be an US-based megacorp. Given that, a country has exactly two choices. First one is let those megagiants colonize the local market, harnessing all the profits and then maybe opening some local offices someday; second one is try to fend off the global number ones and develop own services controlling the same business model slots, understanding that these local players would not be very different from a global player (either by cloning like VKontakte or by converging like Yandex), and that the global megacorp would probably be overally more advanced (counterexample is south korea where local services run circles around clumsy google in the terms of tech). Doing the first way you submit all your market to US megacorps and then try to fit in some original, tiny but global, business niche (since all the big slots would already be taken). So I applaud that Russia could go the second way, for sure.