Founding Topping, a Ukrainian Web Statistics Startup

The challenge

In 2004 only about 3.5% of people in Ukraine used the internet. By 2011 it was almost 29%, according to the World Bank. The Ukrainian web was growing fast and becoming important for business. Website owners, advertisers and media planners needed to know which Ukrainian sites were the most visited, which audiences they served and how one site compared with another. Web counters and public ratings were how the market got those answers.

The biggest player was BigMir)net, a Ukrainian portal launched in 2000 with its own website rating. In 2008, TechCrunch wrote that, according to local press, Google might buy it for $100 million. Topping competed with BigMir for the same websites and the same advertisers.

A counter service is infrastructure. Every page load on every registered site is a request to the counter’s servers, so the load grows with each new site and with every year of internet growth. The rankings and reports have to stay correct while the requests keep coming, and in 2004 there was no cloud to absorb the peaks. Everything ran on our own hardware.

I knew many of the people who built Ukraine’s early internet personally. Topping was shaped by that direct knowledge of how the early Ukrainian web worked: a live, growing community of practitioners and businesses finding their way online for the first time.

My task: as founder and owner, build the platform and the business around it: the counter and the rating, the infrastructure to carry the load, the services that grew from it, and in the end the sale.

How did a web counter and website rating work?

A website owner registered the site and placed a small piece of code on its pages. Each time someone opened a page, the visitor’s browser sent a request to the counter’s servers. The servers counted the visit, noted where the visitor came from and which browser they used, and updated the site’s place in the rating of its category. The owner got free statistics, and a good place in a public rating brought new visitors, so many sites installed a counter. Google Analytics didn’t exist yet: it launched in November 2005.

For the company that runs the counter, every page view on every registered site is a request to its servers, day and night. Serving many connections at the same time on one server was hard enough to get its own name: in 1999 engineer Dan Kegel called it the C10K problem, handling 10,000 clients at once. A counter service has to solve it on its own hardware, with no cloud or managed services to fall back on.

What I did

1. Built Topping, a web counter and website rating platform for Ukraine

   From 2004 to 2011 I built and ran the main platform: a distributed counter system that processed website visit requests at scale, categorised sites across dozens of categories, ranked them by traffic, and produced audience reports and statistical analysis. Topping became #1 in Ukraine by registered websites, with over 80,000 sites, and competed directly with BigMir)net. Public records from those years list Topping with its site rating, its catalogue of Ukrainian sites and its own search engine. Later the platform was rebranded as MyTop-in Net.

   Technical details

   • Collection: a small piece of code on each registered site sent a request to Topping’s servers on every page load, recording the visit and its source.
   • Reports: rankings by category, audience analytics by region and behaviour, and traffic trend reports.
   • Market statistics: global statistics of the Ukrainian internet on MyStat-in Net: browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, search engines and popular search queries.

2. Wrote my own C++ web server on Sun Solaris for 21 million requests a day

   Each registered site triggered a server request on every page load. With 80,000+ sites and Ukrainian internet traffic growing year after year, this needed high-throughput, high-availability infrastructure before the cloud tools that make this easy today existed. I developed my own specialised web server in C++ for Sun Solaris from scratch. The system processed 21 million requests a day, #2 in Ukraine, and was engineered to handle 70 to 80 million requests a day at peak. I designed, built and maintained the architecture, the hardware and the operations myself. In the same years I designed high-load architecture at the web studio I led.

   Technical details

   • Server: a specialised web server for counter requests, written in C++ for Sun Solaris.
   • Infrastructure: self-managed hardware, no cloud or managed services; capacity of 70 to 80 million requests a day.

3. Grew five spinoff services from the same platform

   Topping’s data and its relationships with tens of thousands of site owners made it possible to launch five more service lines, each for a specific need of the early Ukrainian internet: MyStat-in Net (extended statistical analytics), MyMail-in Net (email services), MyNews-in Net (news aggregation and distribution), MyShop-in Net (e-commerce catalogue) and MyDomain-in Net (domain registration and management). Each was a standalone business built on the trust and data the main platform had established. We didn’t plan them in advance: each one followed what registered site owners needed next.

4. Saw MyTop’s statistics software adopted in the United States

   American technology professionals found MyTop’s statistical software on their own and used it as the basis for a web statistics system covering the southeastern United States. They had US-built alternatives and still chose a platform built in Ukraine. For a Ukrainian startup in a market the Western technology world hardly saw, this was strong proof of its technical quality.

5. Sold MyDomain in 2009 and MyTop in 2011 to new investors

   MyDomain-in Net was sold to a new investor in 2009, while the main platform kept running. In 2011 Topping, by then MyTop-in Net, was sold to a new investor, which completed my exit from the venture. Selling two businesses separately, each to its own investor, is harder than selling everything at once: each one has to stand on its own for the buyer.

Results

From 2004 to 2011, the work delivered:

• A web counter and website rating platform with over 80,000 registered Ukrainian websites, #1 in Ukraine by registered websites.
• 21 million requests a day, #2 in Ukraine, on my own C++ web server and self-managed infrastructure built for 70 to 80 million.
• Five spinoff services from the same platform: statistics, email, news, an e-commerce catalogue and domains.
• MyTop’s software used as the basis for a web statistics system in the southeastern United States.
• Two exits: MyDomain-in Net sold in 2009 and MyTop-in Net in 2011, each to a new investor.

What I learned

The infrastructure layer of a market is the most durable investment you can make in it.

Website owners, advertisers, publishers and media planners all needed traffic statistics and rankings, whichever sites rose and fell. Being early helps only if what you build is solid enough to survive the market’s growth. The share of people in Ukraine using the internet grew about eight times while Topping was running, and the infrastructure had to grow with it while real users and business relationships depended on uptime. Data businesses are also platform businesses: the five spinoffs grew from the relationship Topping already had with site owners, because statistics, email, news, shopping and domains were what they needed next.

Evidence and further reading

• News · Searchengines.ruTopping opens global statistics of the Ukrainian internetTopping’s market statistics: browsers, operating systems, search engines and popular queries (in Russian).
• Library list · Odesa National UniversityUkrainian search enginesLists TopPING (topping.com.ua) as a catalogue of Ukrainian sites with a site rating and a search engine.
• Related projectFrom developer to CEO of a Ukrainian web studioThe web studio I led in the same years, with its own high-load statistics work.
• Related projectCTO and co-founder of a privacy startupAnother startup I helped build, turn around and sell.
• Service · this siteOperation Partner: managing partner, co-founder, board memberHow I bring founder and owner experience to companies today.

Internet use in Ukraine is from the World Bank (FRED series). The report that Google might buy BigMir)net is from TechCrunch, 21 February 2008.

Skills and technologies

• Startup founder
• Business owner
• Startup exit
• Web analytics
• Web statistics
• Website rating
• Data products
• High-load architecture
• C++
• Sun Solaris
• Custom web server
• Self-managed infrastructure
• Platform strategy
• Product portfolio
• Competitive strategy
• Email services
• Domain registration
• Ukrainian internet market

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