Building VK New Year App: Turning a seasonal event into a viral game

Context. VK is a major social network among Russian-speaking users with 92M monthly users (2024).

Problem. VK needed to earn more money without showing users even more ads.

Monetisation was mostly built on advertising. Ads annoyed users, reduced engagement, and didn’t help build long-term loyalty.

Goal. Create a festive game that replaces ad-heavy monetisation with engagement-driven revenue through gifts ✦

VK launched a $200,000 holiday giveaway to triple revenue through high-impact ad integrations.

Concept. Together with the Product Managers, we came up with an idea where the memes of 2020 travel by train to gifts in 2021.

The user needed to assemble this ticket, which was split into nine fragments ↓

How do you collect the ticket? By spinning the prize roulette from VK’s partners. Fragments dropped together with the rewards ↓

Retention. To keep retention high, we created a daily rewards system.

Process. One app with a large ecosystem of states and flows behind it.

Trading economy. Our team introduced a mechanic for sending and trading fragments ✦

Users started exchanging and selling fragments, and we saw a spike in communities dedicated to reselling. This boosted the app’s growth ↓

30+ partners joined the event, attracting millions of users through tasks and prizes.

Impact. I designed the full UX and visual system for the New Year App, enabling:

in brand integrations and seasonal promotions

30M

users participated in the New Year event

180M

minutes spent in the game (collectively)

The New Year App became one of VK’s most successful seasonal products and set a new standard for how the platform runs festive events ✦

Featured in the news ↓

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