International social networking site Badoo, just got a $300 million valuation from new Russian investors. TechCrunch UK has the details:

Russian investor Finam has put $30m into UK-based social network Badoo for a 10% stake. The money is to build the service in Russia, where social networking market has reached around 10 million users in January.Badoo’s social networking site with photo and video sharing has 12.7 million registered accounts, mostly in Latin America and Continental Europe. Badoo was launched from London in November 2006 and was the number two fastest rising search term on the Google Zeitgeist list for 2007. It will go up against several other russian sites including Odnoklassniki.ru, Vkontakte.ru and Moikrug.ru which have all attracted several million users each. And now the Russian version of MySpace, which launched only last week.

Badoo’s main pitch is that it carries no advertising, avoiding the kinds of issues Facebook had with Beacon. Instead, Badoo derives its main revenue from offering users the chance to pay to be popular. Instead, Badoo derives its main revenue from offering users the chance to pay to be popular.

comScore shows erratic swings in worldwide traffic, peaking last June at 11.2 million unique visitors, and now at 5.7 million as of December:

(Quintura CEO Yakov Sadchikov has more here).

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