Russia has the largest Internet population out of any country in Europe, with 109.6 million Internet users by June 2017. Russia has the sixth largest base of Internet users in the world, and is preceded by China, India, the US, Brazil, and Japan. In Europe, Germany and the UK follow Russia with 72.3 million and 62.1 million users respectively. Russia has a huge population (estimated at 143,375,006 in 2017) but Internet penetration is relatively low at 76.4%, compared with 94.8 % for the UK, and 89.6 % for Germany.
In 2012, Internet penetration was only at 44.3 %. This monumental growth in internet usage is due in part to the increased consumption of online news and information by Russian internet users. Out of the 3 hours and 34 minutes Russians spend on average online every day, most of the time is spent reading news. According to a report by Deloitte in 2015, this growing use of the Internet to access current events information is likely a direct response to increased political instability at home and abroad.
- VK (or Vkontakte) is Russia’s largest social network, with 46.6 million unique monthly viewers (mainly teens)
- Moi Mir, a social networking site that is an extension of the email provider Mail.ru, is quickly developing into a social hub, with average monthly users of 25 million
- OK.ru (or Odnoklassniki) is starting to catch up with Vkontakte as teenagers leave higher education. The site has over 31.5 million viewers per month, 69% of whom are women
- Twitter is the sixth most popular social networking site in Russia, and has about 7.7 million visitors a month
- YouTube is a popular video site, but is regularly threatened with being blocked. The Russian alternative, Rutube, features Russian-language content and uploads
- Linkedin is blocked in Russia as of 2016
- Pinterest has yet to launch a Russian language version, and in the meantime Russian competitor Pinme has launched to fill the gap in the market. As of August 2017, Pinme had 2.9 million monthly visitors
- Blogging is very popular in Russia – however, a popular blogging site LiveJournal has lost a large proportion of its user base in response to censorship of the site by the Russian government. Despite this, the platform still attracts about 15.2 million monthly users
More on Russian Social Media
