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 ↓

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

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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