Once upon a time in Bulgaria, Lyuben Bellov and Victor Penev had a dream. In 1998 the world’s economies were heating up to an unprecedented dot-com boom. Bulgaria however was still firmly locked in the Online Dark Ages. What if Lyuben and Victor could start an online revolution in Bulgaria? Village asks Victor to recall their history and tell us how they fixed it.

“In January 1999 Net Info launched its first site: netinfo.bg,” explains Victor. Netinfo.bg has developed into Bulgaria’s leading news site. “Later that year we introduced gbg.bg, a directory site that was then very similar to Yahoo!”. Gbg.bg became Bulgaria’s leading directory site. And after gbg.bg came abv.bg. Abv.bg is Bulgaria’s most used free e-mail service. “And sportni.bg, spun-off from netinfo.bg because we noticed sports was such a popular topic,” adds Victor. “We also bought vbox7.bg, our own very popular YouTube. And that’s basically our current portfolio.”

In establishing these major properties, the two-man company from 1998 has grown into a 127 employees-strong company. But there were also some hick-ups underway. Victor: “In 2000, the dot-com boom turned into a dot-com bust. Net Info also experienced difficult times. But we survived and by 2004 we were the clear market leader in page views. Since 2005 we have virtually grown more than 100% in page views and advertising revenue annually.”

But Victor is planning on more to come. “Currently, out of 7,7 million, 2,5 million Bulgarians are online. This online population will grow.” Online advertising should grow as well. “The Bulgarian media sector is growing by more than 30% per year. Online advertising is growing even faster. We want our fair share of that.”

To achieve this Net Info will continue its successful portfolio approach. “We will add small acquisitions and pilot projects to our company. Just small investments, mainly in entertainment, social networking and other web 2.0 properties. If it flies, we’ll invest some more – otherwise we will be quick to kill it.”

Successful new companies attract attention from established ones. This also happened to Net Info. This April, Sanoma Magazines International acquired a majority shareholding and made major inroads in establishing a similar market position online as in magazines. Victor: “You could say our fairy-tale has had a happy end. I am very happy that we have found such a strong partner in Sanoma. We could really benefit from each other’s experience.”

And so it turns out that whenever we at Sanoma Magazines talk about Bulgaria, we now have three favourite things to mention. Next to weightlifting, Bulgaria equals Sanoma Bliasak Bulgaria, the magazine market leader. And luckily we can now also add Net Info to the equation as well.