June 5, 2007CNews
Russia is the only European country where domestic sites are most popular. The US resources Google and Microsoft dominate in all other countries, and only in a few countries the local resources are third most popular.
Russia is the most patriotic country in its internet preferences, Comscore analysts say. Russia is the only country where the first three most popular internet sites are the local Yandex, Mail.ru and Rambler portals. In other European countries the two most popular sites are Google and Microsoft, the software giant Google having become the first in Norway and Sweden. Google is most popular in 13 out of 16 countries.
It should be noted that Russia is one of the few countries of the world, where the majority of users prefer local sites. In the USA and China the situation is practically the same. The leading site in the US is Yahoo. Time Warner is second and Google is third. In China the most popular is Baidu.com, other popular sites are QQ.com and Sina.com.cn. Local sites are also popular in the Czech Republic, which did not come under scrutiny for a number of reasons. In the Czech Republic more than 50% is occupied by the site Seznam.cz.
Russia is last in the penetration of internet access (11%). At the same time, according to the number of monthly unique visitors Russia is not the last one, being sixth after Germany, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Spain. 16 countries were examined all in all.
Russian market participants are not surprised with the positions occupied by the players, but are in doubt about some results. “The spread of internet in Russia is twice as much as the level announced by the company Comscore and reaches 21% according to FOM. (11% according to Comscore )”, Natalya Shahguedanova, Rambler Media PR manager says. “No one knows how all Europe data was calculated, if such large Western Europe countries as Poland and the Ukraine were not examined”, - Ann Artamonova, Mail.ru Marketing Director notes.
Experts believe the rates of the Western internet companies in Russia will not enter top-3 in the nearest future. Yandex says, Russian internet severs will be popular with Russian subscribers till local players provide millions of users with convenient servers using modern technologies. “Local players are very strong in Russia and the users do not know languages well, - Ann Artamonova says. – Global players started operating on the Russian market too late”. “Local portals have done everything possible to provide the Russian users with the modern servers and tools for entertainment, rest, everyday work, information search. Google and Microsoft localized only a few of their projects in Russia, which is not enough to conquer RuNet that does not limit itself to Moscow and St. Petersburg as their users speak English perfectly and have the opportunities to use the original versions of these largest world companies”, - Natalya Shahguedanova adds.
