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Russian Blogs Are Losing Users To Social Networks

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Posted by: Yakov @ 17:13 [16. 04. 08]

The average Russian blogger is a 22-year old female who lives in Moscow, makes 6 blog posts per month and has nineteen blog “friends”, says a new study on the state of the Russian blogosphere from Yandex.

There are 3.8 million Russian blogs, up 23% from October 2007. Only 20% of Russian blogs are updated once every three months (active accounts), down from 30% last October. The most popular blogging platforms LiveJournal and LiveInternet.ru have 230 thousand and 160 thousand active accounts, respectively.

Some 75% of all Russian blogs are hosted by four blogging services: LiveInternet.ru, LiveJournal.com, Blogs@Mail.ru, and Diary.ru (see the right column below), out of more than 80 services in total. Some 200 thousand blog posts are made every day. There are 230 thousand different user communities (see the central column below) in the Russian blogosphere, out of which 25% are active. The most active communities are on LiveJournal where 45% of bloggers belong at least to one community.

The study reveals that a growth in new blogs has slow down significantly as well as number of active blogs has declined. It can be explained by a huge popularity of online social networks in Russia that take active users and audience away from blogs. If the number of blogs increased by only 0.7 million over the past six months, the number of social networking users grew by over 10 million over the same period.

The market experts estimate that blog advertising in Russia will reach $36 million in 2008, up from $20 million in 2007. In comparison, the revenue of the most popular Russian social networking site Odnoklassniki.ru is estimated to reach over $10 million in 2008. According to comScore, top Russian social networking sites have the strongest engagements among top web-sites in Russia.