The Association of Bloggers and Agencies (ABA) plans to create a self-regulatory organization (SRO) that will develop uniform standards and rules for bloggers. This idea was supported by the First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Sergei Kiriyenko during a closed meeting with representatives of the association.
It is assumed that the SRO will independently regulate the work of bloggers and the advertising market for online influencers. As Maxim Perlin, co-founder of the ABA, told Vedomosti, this will help unload the regulatory authorities that monitor Russian bloggers.
According to Perlin, the participants in the meeting asked Kiriyenko to make sure that checks of Internet influencers by the tax authorities are not made public until violations are found, so as not to damage the social capital of popular bloggers.
Another initiative supported by Kiriyenko is the creation of OKVED (All-Russian Classification of Economic Activities) for bloggers. “De facto, the industry has been formed for a long time, but de jure it still does not exist,” explained ABA co-founder Petr Sheksheev. According to him, thanks to OKVED, “blogger” will become a full-fledged profession, which will allow its representatives to receive various rights and preferences, such as tax benefits.
An unnamed federal official told Vedomosti that the influencer marketing market in Russia is already estimated at 45-50 billion rubles. “We need to end the gray past, including in order to build normal work with the tax authorities,” the source concluded.
This year, the Russian investigating authorities opened criminal cases against several popular bloggers for tax evasion for hundreds of millions of rubles. Similar accusations were brought against Valeria Chekalina , Alexandra Mitroshina , Elena Blinovskaya .