COMCON company announced a new program, aimed at detailed analysis of Internet audience in Russia. The project, dubbed "Web-Vector", will provide reliable data on the major characteristics of Internet users in Moscow, St.-Petersburg, and the entire Russia. It will also supply Web professionals with objective parameters for calculations of effectiveness of Internet advertising campaigns.

The study is done quarterly in 40 Russian cities and embraces the adult population (above 16 years old). It represents the audience in the cities having the population of 250,000 and above, which constitute 55% of the city population in Russia. Each quarter, 7800 people are interviewed, including 1100 in Moscow and 600 in St.-Petersburg. During the year, it involves more than 30,000 respondents into the study.

According to studies done in 1998, currently there are 5.3 million users of home PCs in Russia. One of every four users (1.3 mln. on the total) has Internet access. It should be mentioned that according to ROCIT (Russian Non-profit Center for Internet Technologies) estimates, the number of Internet users in Russia was about 1 mln. by July 1998.

COMCON data also reveal that by the end of 1998 there were 60% men and 40% women among Russian users of Internet. These results may be compared with the express polls done by the Infoart Web portal. There were only 18.8% women among Infoart visitors in September 1998, yet this digit reached as high as 30.3% in March 1999.

COMCON also notes that Russian Internet users prefer the following search systems and catalogs to find data in the entire Web: Yahoo (26.0%), AltaVista (25.5%), and Lycos (14.5%). As to Cyrillic search engines, the top three of them are Rambler (23.6%), Aport (18.2%), and Yandex.ru (16.4%).

Source: InfoArt News Agency

---