With 821 million active internet users per month, Russia is the largest connected audience in Europe and is a high growth potential market for any foreign company looking to set up there.
In recent years, internet usage has sharply increased in Russia and is expected to continue to grow in the coming years. 75% of the population is expected to have access to the Internet by 2020 which should represent an online audience of nearly 91.462 million people.
The number of online buyers is also fast growing. In 2016, nearly 42 million Russians3 purchased at least one article online. And among the latter, more than half of the buyers used a foreign site. In other words, the potential is huge!
While lucrative, the Russian digital landscape is as vast and complex as the country itself. Before entering the Russian market, it is crucial to have a clear grasp of consumer behaviour. Choosing a search engine is critical. The following is a ranking of the market share of search engines in Russia in 2018:
While Yandex is the leading search engine in Russia, it is also firmly established in the following countries:
Belarus: 32,7 %
Kazakhstan: 17,8 %
Turkey: 3,9 %
In Russia, Yandex is a source of national pride. In 1997, before Larry Page and Sergey Brin had created Google, Ilya Segalovitch and Arkadi Voloj had already founded Yandex. And for millions of Russians the internet is yandex.
Besides the search engine, Yandex offers many other services such as:
- Yandex.Taxi
- Yandex.Slovari (dictionary),
- Yandex.Maps,
- Yandex.Money,
- Yandex.Translate,
- Yandex.Disk.
Every day, million of internet users use Yandex to send emails, pay bills, find and purchase products or services, plan their evenings or simply browse the web. As Yandex was created by Russians for the Russian language, the platform works especially well in Russia. The same search term will deliver a much larger search volume on Yandex than on Google. In advertising, this is a big advantage as it considerably reduces bid pricing!
This certainly explains why Yandex is the online advertising leader in Russia with 60% of market share. Advertisers have access to a wide range of services and tools. For more information, read our article about advertising on Yandex, at Yandex.Direct
1 Yandex
2 https://www.statista.com/statistics/567007/predicted-number-of-internet-users-in-russia/
3 Yandex