Online trading website traffic surges due to crisis

Photo: Eugene Pavlenko / Kommersant

According to the data of the analytical company ComScore, now the traffic to both news and banking sites has fallen before the pre-crisis period of last year. Nevertheless, a number of resources devoted to online trading have retained their visitors, traffic on such sites has grown by 63.7% over the year, Kommersant writes . ComScore specialists analyzed the attendance of the ten largest sites on the Russian Internet in three categories: financial media, banks' websites and online trading sites.

According to the study, a significant increase in resource traffic in all three categories occurred in December. According to experts, traffic growth was triggered by currency fluctuations and the banking crisis. December 2014 saw a peak in the growth of the value of currencies against the dollar, and by the end of the year, the ruble depreciated by 70% against the dollar and by about 50% against the euro.

In the same December 2014, traffic to the Sberbank website increased from 12.36 million Russians in November to 14.69 million in December. The total time that visitors spent on the site increased from 260 million to 329 million minutes. However, already in January, these indicators began to decline, and in July 2015, traffic and viewing time decreased to last year's figure. A similar situation was observed with traffic to sites of other banks.

The audience of financial resources behaved in approximately the same way. So, the sites dedicated to finance received maximum traffic and user activity in December - then traffic increased from 13.4 million in November to 15.3 million. But after the surge, the audience of news sites was lower than a year earlier.

As mentioned above, the only category of resources that has retained new users is trading sites. Here, the total audience of sites increased from 3.8 million in November to 6.8 million in December. In January-February, the growth of visitors also continued, and in April reached a peak of 8.59 million. As a result, the audience of such sites grew from 3.83 million in July last year to 6.27 in July 2015. The growth was 63.7%.

“Recently there was another surge, but now people are gradually calming down. In addition to the jump in exchange rates, attendance growth can also be explained by concerns about plastic cards and bills: attendance growth occurs, for example, when banks revoke their licenses, ”Anton Arnautov, head of the Bankir.ru portal, commented on the situation.