The audience of RuNet has grown by 7% in the last 3 years

17.04.2019

The executive director of Mediascope, Ksenia Achkasova has presented data about Russia’s internet audience on the forum RIF+KIB 2019.

According to the data from Mediascope, the audience of RuNet reached 93 million people in 2019, it has grown by 7% in the last 3 years mostly due to mobile and older users. According to the data from September 2018 – February 2019, 76% of the population aged over 12 used the internet at least once a month. 

Currently the most popular device for using the internet in Russia is a smartphone: over the past 3 years their use has grown by 22%, 61% of the population use one (data from the whole of Russia, people aged over 12, September 2018- February 2019). Among users of all age groups, time spent online on mobile devices is either more or the same as time spent online on computers and laptops. For internet access of mobile devices the majority of people use Wi-Fi networks with some advantage relative to mobile data networks. In February of 2019, 67% of all traffic from smartphones and tablets used Wi-Fi networks (Russian cities with a population of over 100k, ages 12-64).

The usage of desktop devices has decreased over 3 years by 3%, currently 52% of the population use them to access the internet. In addition to this the usage on the internet on tablets has decreased by 4% over the last three years, only 16% of Russians use this type of device to access the internet. The usage of Smart TVs has grown by 5%- 13% of the Russian population use the internet on ‘smart’ TVs at least once a month.

The structure of media consumption on RuNet is quite stable. The most in demand resources remain social media, online messengers, online shopping, search engines, video-streaming platforms and online banking.

Thematic preferences of citizens from different cities change from place to place: citizens of cities with a population of more than 700k are more inclined to use GPS services as well as navigation services, and ticket sale services. In cities with a population from 100k to 700k, online coupon and discount finder service are more commonly used than in other locations. Among citizens of Moscow there are more users of ticket and travel apps, as well as government services and financial resources, and among citizens of St Petersburg, navigation, GPS as well as reference, encyclopedic and educational resources are most common.

According to the data from February of 2019, the most popular resource for the total audience on mobile and desktop devices on RuNet are: Yandex- it is used by 47% of people daily aged 12-64 living in cities with a population of more than 100k, VKontakte is used by 43% of people and Google by 39%. Among desktop users, the most used daily platform was also Yandex- everyday it is used by slightly less than a third of the population. On mobile, Whatsapp has the biggest audience. 37% of the population use this messenger on their mobile devices.