Russian opinion poll highlights growing popularity of social networking sites

The number of Russians who use the internet was up to 55 per cent as of the start of 2012, and it is specifically the number of people using the internet daily which is rising fastest (from 30 per cent to 36 per cent). Some 45 per cent of people are currently not using the resources of the World Wide Web, sociologists from VTsIOM [the state-funded All-Russia Centre for the Study of Public Opinion] told Interfax on Monday [13 February].

According to their information, based on the findings of a nationwide survey carried out in February, 82 per cent of Russian internet users are registered on social networking sites, whereas in 2010 this figure stood at 52 per cent.

A typical user of social networking sites is aged between 18 and 24 (96 per cent), is comfortably off (87 per cent) and lives in Moscow and St Petersburg (94 per cent).

The survey showed that the most popular social networking sites in the Russian internet are still Odnoklassniki [Russian equivalent of Classmates] (used by 73 per cent of internet users) and VKontakte [Russian equivalent of Facebook] (62 per cent).

In third place is the Moy Mir network, whose popularity has grown over the past two years from 22 per cent to 31 per cent. The audience for the foreign sites Facebook (from 5 per cent to 18 per cent) and Twitter (from 2 per cent to 9 per cent) has risen significantly.

Other sites account for no more than 6 per cent of users, the sociologists said.