Social Portrait of Online Media Audience: Changing Trends and Preferences among Russians

Abstract

The rapid spreading of the Internet and virtual ways of communication actualizes the issue of compiling a sociological portrait of online mass media audience. The study examined the socio-demographic composition of online media audience in Russia in the dynamics over the last ten years from 2008 to 2018. The analysis of empirical data on the main classification characteristics allowed identifying the stable trends in the changes in the Internet audience and their preferences. We found that Internet users often do not use news websites directly (35 per cent of the entire audience); most of all, they are interested in the most aggregated overview or a specific piece of news. Every year, the online media audience increasingly differentiates and becomes more diverse by sex, age, occupation and other characteristics. A significant number of Internet users consists of Russian residents at the age of 25 to 34 years (29 per cent). The elder generation has begun to use the Internet more often (21 per cent), while the other two age groups of the audience at the age of 12-17 years and 18-24 years are the smallest ones, accounting for 10 per cent and 14 per cent respectively. The main companies that significantly affect the public mood in the country are Yandex and Mail.ru; they control over 75 per cent of the market. The article provides an assessment of consumers’ readiness to perceive the online media as the main and only source of information