About Users and Non-Users

The most common questions asked by all those interested in the development of the Internet in Russia (and especially by journalists): “How many users are there in Russia, and how will the Internet grow in the future, will the crisis affect the growth of the Internet?” and “What happens to the Internet outside the capitals, and how much of the country's regions are really Internetized?”

The volume of Internet audience in our country is studied a lot, but there has not been a detailed study in all subjects of the Federation for a long time. An even greater deficit is information about those people who do not use the Internet yet, but who can start. It is the volume and mood of this “Internet reserve” that determines how and where the Internet will grow in Russia.

With the support of Yandex, the Public Opinion Foundation recently (in March 2009, that is, in times of crisis) conducted a large-scale study, during which 34 thousand people were interviewed in 68 federal subjects in 1920 settlements. Everyone who said that they didn’t use the Internet was asked additional questions - in order to understand which of these “non-users” could join the ranks of the Internet audience in the near future and what is the main obstacle to the Internet.

As the picture shows, more than half of the inhabitants of Russia are not yet personally familiar with the Internet. At the same time, an adult (18+) monthly audience in March amounted to 34.9 million people. Here's how the answers to the question “When was the last time you used the Internet?”

Counting tens of millions of people, the “gray zone” in this diagram is very heterogeneous inside: there are those who are aware of the benefits of the Internet, but who are unable (most often - financially) to use them, and who are fundamentally not ready to become users. Moreover, the share of the reserve is almost a third of all “non-users”.

In other words, Russia's Internet audience can grow by another third if Internet access becomes cheaper and easier, but further growth already depends on outreach and educational activities. Moreover, if the “reserve” consists mainly of young people, then the remaining groups are represented by older ages, so we have to work with them. And it will be necessary to start not from the Internet, but from basic computer literacy: 36% of all respondents admitted that they had never dealt with a computer.

The geographical distribution of Internet use shows very well where exactly the representatives of the “reserve” live. The picture is a little depressing: a more than six-fold gap in the percentage of residents who use the Internet daily demonstrates how far before the entire country is Internetized.

In a short note, it is impossible to even summarize in an abstract way a lot of interesting facts and conclusions from a report of one and a half hundred pages, so we invite everyone who is interested - and who have questions to the above - download the full version of the FOM study from Yandex - or directly from the FOM website . Andrey Sebrant, lover of interesting numbers