In 2023, Russians were interested in TV series on the Internet 13% more often than a year earlier

In 2023, Russian residents were interested in TV series 13% more often than a year earlier, and 7% more often than in 2021, Kinopoisk calculated. At the same time, the share of interest in Russian projects updated the record three times, the last time in December, against the backdrop of the release of the series “The Boy’s Word,” exceeding 61%. Market participants attribute the trend to increased marketing investments in original projects and decreased costs of promoting foreign films.

Kommersant got acquainted with the Kinopoisk study based on the Kinopoisk Index Pro tool. According to him, TV series in 2023 scored approximately 487 thousand interest points, which is 7% more than in 2021 (453 thousand points). The number of points depends on how often viewers were interested in the project in search engines, on the Internet pages of TV channels, online cinemas, video services (including YouTube), in encyclopedias and other resources. Yandex data is used, including Search and Yandex.Browser, as well as Google data. The index takes into account about 250 million visits per month, all of which are converted into points.

In 2022, the total index amounted to 430 thousand points, which is 13% less than last year. Analysts attributed this to a general drop in demand for entertainment content against the backdrop of the Ukrainian crisis, postponements of premieres and the departure of Netflix (see “Kommersant” dated February 17, 2023). Russian projects became an obvious point of growth of interest. According to the Kinopoisk Index Pro, they took up half the ranking of the top 20 most popular, while in 2022 there were only five of them. The share of interest in domestic TV series updated the record in December: the figure was 61.17% against the backdrop of the release of the series “The Boy’s Word.” At the same time, back in March it reached 43% for the first time, and in November it exceeded 49%, the company notes.

“Viewers prefer stories that reinterpret the past or provoke nostalgia: “The Boy’s Word,” “The King and the Jester,” “Peace! Friendship! Chewing Gum!” they talk about previous decades, and the new “Daddy’s Daughters” and the latest season of “Real Boys” introduce new twists and turns in the lives of old familiar heroes,” says a representative of Index.

Russians also continue to be interested in foreign TV series that are not legally available in the country. But their attention is more often directed to old projects than to premieres, the study says. Thus, not a single foreign series of 2023 was included in the top 20: the last episode of Breaking Bad was released more than ten years ago, and the finale of Peaky Blinders took place in 2022.

MTS Media CEO Alexey Ivanov confirmed that Kion’s flagship direction remains the production and release of films and TV series from the original line, since more than 70% of service users watch them. Gazprom-Media Holding emphasized that Premier (part of GPMH) does not experience a negative impact from the reduction in market supply from Western distributors: “In 2023, the online cinema expanded the library of foreign content by 20% year-on-year, and the share users watching foreign projects on the video service increased to 44%.”

The growth in interest and the number of search queries is an indicator, on the one hand, of a change in the structure of content available to viewers in Russia, says Start executive director Yulia Mindubaeva, “on the other hand, the effect of growing marketing investments in original series simultaneously with the disappearance of promotion of major films.” Thus, cinemas that show films from foreign rights holders cannot afford large budgets for promoting foreign films, experts interviewed by Kommersant note.

Based on the results of 2023, one can see an interesting trend, says a Kommersant source on the media market: “The consumption of entertainment content has overtaken even the Covid time, when Russians were massively buying subscriptions to video services. And last year, online cinemas partially recouped the losses that 2022 brought them.” According to the interlocutor’s forecast, in the absence of high-profile news events, the share of interest in TV series in 2024 may exceed the figures in 2020 by 10%.

Yulia Yurasova