(Information bulletin based on data from the Yandex.News service, September 2008-January 2009)
Highlights:
An average online media source releases 16 news items per working day and 4 news items per nonworking day;
The amount of “copy-pasted” news – news articles copied unaltered from other media sources – during the past few years has held at 20%;
Only 5% of all news was covered by more than 20 publishers;
Bloggers are much more reticent with the words than journalists. An average online media report consists of 210 words, while an average blog posting has 101 words;
56% of readers of online mass media are purposefully searching for information on the latest events, while 29% are incidental readers;
(Information bulletin based on Yandex search data)
Highlights:
According to Yandex’s estimate, web users currently view search results pages of all search engines in the Russian Internet more than 1.9bn times per month;
A typical search query consists of two or three words written in Cyrillic letters;
Nouns are most frequently used in search queries. A relatively small 1.5% searches have dirty words in them;
14-15% of all search queries contain various mistakes and typos. Currently, the most common misspelled query is [îäíîęëŕńńíčęč] (classmates) (one ń instead of two as in îäíîęëŕńńíčęč);
For the first time in years, the rating of the most popular queries on Yandex has changed considerably. The top-10 most popular search queries now includes five queries related to social networks (i.e., vkontakte.ru).
(Information bulletin on development of the Internet in Russia’s regions, fall — winter 2007, based on data from various Yandex services: Blog search, Market, News, the Yandex.Cities project, as well as on information from the FOM foundation, TNS Gallup, RU-Center and the Black Square project.)
Highlights:
The number of websites in the Russian Internet increased 66% during 2007. The number of domains registered in the regions was growing slightly slower (57% this year)
Moscow and Saint Petersburg are leading in all measures of Internet development and web user activity
The Northwestern Federal Region is leading among all seven federal regions in the rate of Internet penetration (31%), with the Far Eastern Federal Region coming next (28%)
The Central Federal Region has the largest number of Internet users (after Moscow and Saint Petersburg), which is 17% of all population online in Russia. The regions with the lowest number of web users are the Urals and the Far East (6% and 5% correspondingly)
The Urals Federal Region, on average, is twice ahead of other regions in Internet activity
The Southern and the Siberian Federal Regions are the closest to Russia’s average in all measures of Internet development
(Information bulletin based on the Yandex.Money data, the summer of 2007)
Highlights:
User activity in online payments more than doubled from June 2006 to June 2007
E-money were more often used to pay for services than for goods
The largest growth during the year (June 2006 — June 2007) was demonstrated in three segments of the market: information services, hosting, and software
Most often users make online payments for cell phone service
(Informational bulletin based on the Yandex.Direct statistics, January 2006 — June 2007)
Highlights:
The Russian market for contextual advertising grew by 2—2.5 times during the past two years
Number of conversions made from contextual ads to advertisers’ sites showed almost four times increase in 2006
Contextual advertising turnover amounted to $110 mln in 2006 (out of $210 mln overall turnover of the Russian Internet advertising in 2006)
For the first time in the history of Runet, contextual advertising overtook the display one not only in it’s growth rates, but also in absolute numbers
The share of search queries, bought for displaying contextual advertisements, almost doubled in 2006
Moscow consumers more than the regional ones were interested in contextual advertising making their conversions to advertisers’ sites more often
(Information bulletin based on the Yandex Blog Search data, fall 2006)
Highlights:
The Russian-language blogs are hosted at 14 major blog-hosting servers with the “Big four” (publishing from 50.000 to 350.000 blogs) including Livejournal.com, Liveinternet.ru, Blogs.mail.ru, Diary.ru.
The Russian blogosphere is growing exponentially. In 2006, more than 100 new blogs were created every hour.
60% of Russian bloggers are female, 40% are male.
An average Russian blogger is a 21-year old female student from Moscow.
Since fall 2006, Yandex has been issuing surveys on different sectors of the Russian Internet. To receive our surveys via e-mail, please, send us your request and contact information to analyst@yandex-team.ru.
