LiveJournal, owned and managed by Russian company SUP Media, just announced [1] [ru] a grant program that will target the development of “interesting, but less well known blogs.” The grant funds could be used by a starting blogger to promote their blog through various paid “promo” services run by the company.
While it is at its core fairly transparent advertisement for these promo services, the $300,000 fund distributed through the grant “community” lj-grants.livejournal.com [2] [ru] represents a sizable investment into RuNet. It remains to be seen whether programs like this will manage to maintain LiveJournal's alpha-dog status in RuNet, a status which faces stiffening competition from Facebook, VKontakte, and stand-alone blogs.