Yandex Analyzes the Russian Internet Media

Internet, February 20, 2009. Yandex published an information bulletin on Russian online mass media. The report is based on data aggregated by the Yandex.News service. The full text of report “Media Sphere of the Russian Internet” is available (in Russian) at http://company.yandex.ru/researches.

Based on January 2009 data, every working day at least 36,000 new media items appear in the Russian internet, every nonworking day there are at least 9,000 new items. On average, an online medium releases 16 new items per working day and 4 new items per nonworking day.

An average online media report consists of 210 words combined into 13–14 sentences. Its headline has 7–8 words. In contrast with journalists, bloggers are much more succinct. An average blog posting consists of 101 words with a 2-3-word heading.

About 8% of items refer to other mass media resources by featuring their names or by directly linking to their websites. The amount of “copy-pasted” materials – news items that news resources copy from one another and publish unaltered – remains the same, at 20% for the past several years. In the fall of 2008, 80% of online media published copied materials at least once. Only 5% of news was featured in more than 20 resources.

56% of readers of online mass media are purposefully searching for information on the latest events, while 29% are incidental readers. News consumers in Russia are more task-oriented than their Ukrainian counterparts.

14% of items include experts’ opinion expressed either in a quote or as reported speech. In the fall of 2008, the most frequently quoted persons in online media were Dmitry Medvedev (17,767 quotes) and Vladimir Putin (11,646 quotes).

In the fall of 2008, the majority of news items (26%) appeared in the «Economy» category, «financial crisis» was profiled in online mass media more than 38,000 times, and «economic crisis» was mentioned more than 9,000 times. More than 20% of news items in the «Economy» category included the word «crisis».

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