Alternatives to all Western social networks and services have been formed on Runet – Rossiyskaya Gazeta

Over the past two years, the landscape of social media and content services in Russia has changed enormously; The so-called “digital migration” is occurring both due to changes in policies towards Russian users by foreign social networks themselves, and due to the regulation and blocking of some services by the State in response to their actions, they point out. the authors of the study carried out by AKAR and ROCIT.

The authors of the study consider that a fundamentally new factor is that today Russian companies are leaders in all segments. In some places this happened due to the banning or departure of foreign leaders, in others due to the formation of their own national platforms.

Russian platforms grow thanks to their own development and not only by blocking their competitors.

As a result, in 2023 the number of players on the market increased to 63: 28 of them are national social networks. “VKontakte, Telegram and OK can be considered developed, and online platforms such as LOOKY, Yappy, TenChat, Yandex.Music and Sound have potential for rapid development,” the researchers note.

As an alternative to Wikipedia, the authors of the study call the projects “Ruviki” and “Runiversalis.” “Ruviki” has practically replaced the entire Russian-language article segment on Wikipedia. And, according to the first vice-president of AKAR, Valentin Smolyakov, “today in Ruviki the same number of articles are created daily as in the Russian-language segment of Wikipedia.

Anton Perepletchikov/ Oleg Kapranov

Attention is also paid to the video services segment. Thus, the video platform Rutube has doubled its audience position this year. At the end of 2023, Rutube’s monthly audience exceeded 40 million users, 57.5% more than in 2022. “Our market is not limited only to VKontakte, OK and Telegram. Here we see LOOKY, Yappy, TenChat. “The music segment is doing very well, where there are platforms Yandex.Music and Sound, Spotify and others. Foreign music platforms are practically us. We have completely lost our market,” says Smolyakov.

As AKAR and ROCIT report, today Russian companies are more actively exploring new platforms. According to the head of the Association of Bloggers and Agencies, Tanya Ivanova, “platform snobbery”, when key bloggers ignored certain platforms, is a thing of the past. Bloggers also consider all the platforms available to work with. For them, Ivanova points out, an important factor is the presence of large advertisers and the government.

In many ways, this is probably due to the discontent of State Duma deputies with the fact that large Russian structures, including those with state participation, continue to place ads on accounts of blocked sites. As noted by State Duma deputy and chairman of the board of directors of ROCIT, Anton Gorelkin, initiatives will probably be prepared that will limit such work for companies with state participation.

The fact that Instagram (owned by Meta, recognized as extremist and banned in Russia) began to gradually regain lost ground is confirmed by a Brand Analytics study corresponding to the fall of 2023. From this it follows that the platform, after a year and a half of decline, has recovered some of its authors and has also increased content production by Russian-speaking bloggers.

However, the authors of the AKAR and ROCIT study believe that greater accessibility and development will ultimately tilt users towards Russian resources.