Yandex Conducted a Study of Russian-Language Blogosphere

According to Yandex, there are more than 1,150,000 weblogs in the Russian Internet as of September 2006. The Russian-language blogosphere is growing exponentially: in 2005, only 20 new blogs were created in an hour; in 2006, this figure exceeds 100. Three new entries (on average) are posted every second.

The majority of bloggers (more than 60%) use Russian hosting servers. A year ago, the picture was quite different: Livejournal.com (US) had more users than all Russian blog hosting servers together. Today, Russian-speaking bloggers favor local servers almost doubly compared to western ones: around 1,400 new weblogs are created daily at Russian blog hosting servers, and only 750 at Livejournal.com.

Top four most popular blog hosting servers are LiveJournal.com (44.78% of all Russian language blog entries daily), LiveInternet.ru (19.98%), Diary.ru (13.15%), and Blogs.mail.ru (7.34%). 60% of Russian bloggers are female, 40% are male. Their average age is 21, several years less than the average age of a Russian Internet user. A vast majority of bloggers live in millionaire cities. Nearly 80% are from Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

The blogosphere covers cultural and political events as well as internal happenings that are of interest mostly for bloggers themselves. The public events that were most widely discussed in weblogs in summer 2006 were Israel-Lebanon conflict, FIFA World Cup 2006, and the rift in the Ukrainian Parliament. The most popular culture event in Russian-language blogosphere that season was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest movie.

Yandex Blog Search is a tool for navigating public opinions on the Web. The service was launched almost two years ago; a new version was out in March 2006. Close to half a million people use Blog Search every month.

Contacts:

Elena Kolmanovskaya, Chief Editor

Dina Litvinova, Head of Yandex PR

Phone: +7 495 739-70-00

Fax: +7 495 739-70-70

E-mail: [email protected]