Four out of five Russians access the Internet daily (in 2001, only 2%). Most of these are young respondents, but the number of older users is growing. Two thirds of the respondents regularly use social networks, and this proportion has tripled since 2011. The most popular social networks are VK and YouTube, and their audience continues to grow (for example, VK’s audience has tripled in 13 years). 80% of the respondents use messengers, and this number has doubled in 8 years. Whatsapp and Telegram are the most popular, and their audience is growing. A quarter of Russians use VNP services at least from time to time, over the past two years their share has hardly changed.
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The role of television and the Internet as the main sources of news and the TOP most popular Russian journalists
Television remains the main source of information by audience reach and trust among Russians. At the same time, the combined audience of various news sources on the Internet exceeded the audience of TV news. Younger, educated and affluent respondents are more likely to get their news from the Internet. Older people, as well as less affluent and less educated respondents, are more likely to watch news on television. The audience of telegram channels has stabilized at the level of a quarter of the country’s population after a sharp increase in 2022. The audience of video blogs is slowly increasing, but the majority of respondents do not watch them. The most popular journalists, leading socio-political programs were V. Solovyov, O. Skabeeva, E. Popov, M. Simonyan and D. Kisilev. Independent bloggers and journalists are losing their audience.