The audience of Russian social networks has increased significantly

The audience of Russian social networks has increased significantly

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The Russian Facebook audience has decreased by 6.5 times in two years,
and Instagram – 5.5 times (both social networks belong to Meta, which is recognized as extremist and banned in Russia). According to estimates by Mediascop, Instagram in February 2024 was visited on average by just under 7 million Russians over 12 years of age at least once a day. On Facebook, the figure dropped to 1.5 million people, and users began to spend almost a third less time there, an average of 11 minutes a day. The duration of Instagram use decreased by 17%, to about half an hour per day.

Both social networks have been blocked in the country since March 2022. However, in terms of active audience, these platforms have not lost ground that much, says Vasily Cherny, director of strategic communications at Brand Analytics: “Instagram, of course, has fallen greatly, but has not disappeared; in terms of the number of active authors, it remains in second position after Vkontakte,” in terms of content volume – in third position. People don’t like working through a VPN, but so far there hasn’t been a convenient alternative that would appeal to Russian users.

Despite all the wonderfulness of VKontakte, the Instagram audience has not really moved anywhere. For this reason, Roskomnadzor recently made a decision on the labeling of advertising, including on the Instagram platform, despite the fact that the restrictions that were introduced continue to apply, advertising still needs to be labeled. The situation with Facebook is different; this network has never been popular in the regions, and in Moscow it has lost many users. There remains an active politicized and business audience, in general, Facebook does not make a difference in the Russian media field.”

Against the background of blocking of foreign social networks, Telegram received the largest audience in two years, now the number of users is almost 60 million people. And the largest increase, almost threefold, was on the Zen platform, with an average of 32 million people visiting it per day. At the same time, the TikTok social network, which several years ago banned Russians from posting new content and conducting live broadcasts, saw a slight drop in the figure, from 33 million visitors to 30 million per day.

Against this background, advertisers have begun to noticeably migrate to domestic platforms, but there are nuances, says producer and founder of the PurpleDoor agency Alexey Pak: “The most important customers of advertising and the majority of the market are large companies. They, of course, moved to Russian social networks and are very rarely advertised on prohibited ones. Most large companies interact in one way or another with government agencies, and in principle, as I understand it, they are prohibited from implementing advertising campaigns on Instagram or other prohibited social networks, so only small and medium-sized businesses and bloggers remain there.

If we are talking about Russian brands, they are no longer advertised on TikTok in principle, because it is impossible. In this social network, monetization has completely died. In Russian social networks, the main budgets have been redistributed between three platforms: Telegram, Zen and Vkontakte.”

Indeed, the Instagram audience has begun to decline noticeably over the past couple of years, confirms tech blogger Valentin Petukhov, known as Wylsacom. However, it quite quickly flows to other platforms where there are opportunities to earn money, says Kommersant FM’s interlocutor: “We, one might say, closed Instagram for ourselves as a platform for making money and opened Telegram, where we transferred all advertising contracts. VKontakte is also quite popular, but it could not completely replace Instagram, and the audience was more willing to go to Telegram.

Large advertisers, frankly, no longer consider Instagram as a platform for posting any content, unfortunately. Those with tens of millions of subscribers, of course, do not want to lose this audience, but we made a strategic decision that our 2 million subscribers converted into 1.1 million on Telegram. On YouTube, we’ve hit a certain ceiling, and it’s not entirely clear how to gain a new audience.”

Meanwhile, the income of major bloggers on Instagram grew by a third in 2023. The total income of the five leading content makers from advertising exceeded 60 million rubles, the Association of Bloggers and Agencies calculated after analyzing published posts and Reels. The singer Klava Koka earned the most in 2023 – more than 21 million rubles. and fashion blogger Karina Nigai – over 18 million rubles.


Everything is clear with us – Telegram channel “Kommersant FM”.

Vladimir Rasulov

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