Russia — The Internet Powerhouse Despite Sanctions
Russia and Russian companies remain a powerful force on the global internet despite all the sanctions levied since the invasion of Ukraine. Here are some of the surprising facts about the extent of Russian influence on the new media world.
- It has one of the top ten search engines globally.
- It has one of the world’s leading news and media publishers
- It has two of the top 50 social media networks in the world
- It has one of the most popular email services in the world.
The figures come from the digital measurement service, SimilarWeb, which analyzes and tracks sites’ search engine optimization. However, other analytic services show similar results. Those other services include search engine optimization sites, Moz and Ahrefs.
Part of the explanation for the websites’ success is their popularity in Russia, but that doesn’t explain all of the global ranking. There’s only 258 Million Russian speaking people in the world, although of course the sites do provide English versions of their sites. To make it even harder to understand the Russian impact, these rankings came even as the United States and the European Union crack down on Russian media, especially broadcast channels RT and Sputnik.
Under the category of “news and media publisher,” the Russia site, turbopages.org, is ranked #1 in that category in Russia, making it the fifth most popular website overall in Russia and ranked #30 in terms of websites worldwide with 1.1 Billion visits. The other two search engine analysis sites do not rank it, although it does appear as a sub-site to the madeinrussia.ru site.
It may be surprising that a news and media site would still prove so popular worldwide after Russia’s own clampdown on all its media with many being threatened with jail. Almost equally surprising is the popularity of the Saint Petersburg based social media network, vk.com, which claims to be the “largest European social network with more than 100 Million active users.”
The site’s mission self-description states that “… our goal is to keep old friends, ex-classmates, neighbors and colleagues in touch.”
SimilarWeb ranks it #22 globally while the Ahrefs search engine service ranks it #24 and the Moz service puts it at #26. The other popular Russian social media network is ok.ru which comes in at #50 worldwide.
One more surprising statistic from the report is that the Russian based search engine Yandex.ru is ranked #8 in the world in terms of websites and #3 in the category of search engines with an average 4 Billion visits a day. By way of comparison, that number is dwarfed by Google which is not only the #1 search engine in the world but the #1 website overall with an average of 89 Billion visits a day. However, Yandex is not far behind the Chinese based, baidu.com, which is the second most popular search engine in the world and the #6 ranked website, averaging 5.7 Billion visits a day. China’s only other site to make it to the SimilarWeb ranking is The ‘news and media publishing’ site qq.com which some people may remember as TenCent,
The Ahrefs analysis puts Yandex at #40 while the now-defunct Alexa search engine analysis site had it at #23. The Ahrefs site lists two other Russian websites which make it to its top 100 list: kinopoisk.ru and ivi.ru. Ahrefs analysis also shows the Russian version of Wikipedia at #17.On the Ahrefs analysis, YouTube comes in at #1 globally while Facebook comes in at #2 and the English version of Wikipedia of #3.
Under the category of “news and media publishing,” six other websites made it into SimilarWeb’s top 50 with, surprisingly, Yahoo proving to be a dominant voice. That’s because it publishes under three different websites, the primary — Yahoo.com site but also yahoo.co.jp and news.yahoo.co.jp)
Facebook of course is the dominant social media network with its nearly 3 Billion daily users and 19 Billion visits. The others, in order, are Twitter (#4), Instagram (#5), Whatsapp (#11), TikTok (#18), Reddit (#19), LinkedIn (#22) and Discord (#25) which started as a site for gamers but has become a popular site for “hanging out” although now with an age restriction. (Disclaimer: The SimilarWeb rankings will vary week to week and the purpose of any particular website may vary as well.)
The Moz site provides a ranking of the top 500 websites based, it says, on how Google ranks websites. It also lists other websites that link to these sites along with a domain authority score. On this list, Apple scores the top ranking.
Okay, here’s the final ‘kicker’ to this analysis. Can you guess what other category made it to the top 50 list on SimilarWeb? Surprise! — Not! Porno sites scored five of the top 50. In ranking order: Xvideos (#10), XNXX (#13), Pornhub ((#17), Xhamster (#20), and Realsrv (#45).
