There are now 46.5 million Internet users in Russia, Russian Business Consulting reports. Every day 32 million Russians are on-line - the number was 10 million only two years ago.
The largest numbers of Internet users are found in the big cities of St. Petersburg (59%) and Moscow (58 %). In the larger Moscow region, Murmansk Oblast, Khanty-Manskiysk and Yakutiya, over 50 percent of the population have access to the Internet.
Russia started developing broadband connection only 1,5-2 years ago, but already 19 percent of the Internet users enjoy this service. The number of people using Internet via mobile phones is also constantly growing.
In May 2010 the The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) registered Russia’s national Cyrillic domain as .рф, making Russia first country in the world to be given the right to launch a national Cyrillic domain, as BarentsObserver reported.
Social networks have gained popularity in Russia. Whereas Russians earlier mostly used Russian networks like V Kontakte or Odnoklassniki, they now more often are a part of international networks like Facebook. Twitter is another popular network in Russia, especially after President Dmitry Medvedev launched his own account.
In april 2010 BarentsObserver became the first news-provider based in Norway to be listed on Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia and the world’s second largest non-English-language web-portals. All news articles and briefs published on BarentsObserver are co-published in the Russian language.
Since the registration on Yandex, more and more Russians have started reading the BarentsObserver. According to the latest statistics for November-December, Russia was the country with most BarentsObserver readers, followed by Norway, the United States, Finland and the United Kingdom.
