According to the latest TNS data, 67% of Russia’s “at-home” internet users go online with broadband access (Ethernet, ADSL or cable TV networks). Such results were gathered by a telephone poll organized in February 2008 (13,500 respondents in 77 cities with population of 100,000 and more, aged 12 and older). 

Despite the existing problems with broadband access outside of large cities and the cost of internet traffic in the regions, broadband access is already a popular service. In many ways “at-home” internet users define the nature of the internet audience’s needs and expectation from the services and content resources available online. 

Research results show that in mid-sized and large-sized cities of Russia 24 million people use the internet no less than once a month (monthly audience). Of this number 70% - 16.5 million – go online from home (often, they also use internet at work, at the university or at a friend’s home). Two thirds of the “at-home” internet audience use broadband access – in absolute numbers this figure exceeds 11 million. This corresponds with research of J’son&Partners that said that at the end of 2007 there were over 6 million at-home broadband subscriptions in Russia – and on average every online household consists of two internet users.

It's not often that the front page of the New York Times has a Cyrillic headline as the main story on its homepage. But that's just what the users of LiveJournal were able to achieve this weekend. The community which the New York Times launched on LiveJournal has made waves across the globe. The community's moderators had a simple goal, to publish articles written by New York Times journalists and then offer Russian web-user the chance to comment. The project turned out to be a simple "breakthrough" to quote one of the paper's key editors.

LiveJournal is a platform and anyone is welcome to post whatever they want, as long as they stay within clear guidelines on taste and decency. And this weekend the users of LiveJournal showed that the site is one of the most effective communications platform in Russia. But what changed this weekend was that for perhaps the first time the platform, thanks to the translations by the New York Times and the republication of comments from LiveJournal users on NewYorkTimes.com, became a vehicle for a mass international audience to find out what Russians think of their own country.

The New York Times have more articles to publish and hopefully LiveJournal users have more comments to make. As we have said before, the development of LiveJournal as a global platform is an important challenge for SUP, and the experience of this weekend has provided many valuable learnings. Let's see what happens next!

For those of you who are interested in the statistics of this project, then the following should be of interest. In the first four days since the establishment of nytimesinmoscow community 1,328 users signed up to read it, while 730 became members. The first article from the new series gathered 2,512 comments. Yandex.Blogs search finds 230 direct links to the community's first post, while Google comes up with 659 mentions of the project outside of LiveJournal.

The folks at Yahoo! have no doubt had rather a few things on their minds over the past few days.  However, they have still had time to complete an interesting piece of research on their Russian audience!  Last year we hooked up with Yahoo! to sell the advertising slots in the pages served to Russian IP addresses to local advertisers.  SUP’s sale house +SOL have been doing this for some time and have been waiting for this data to strengthen their sales case.  The results reveal some interesting insights into the use of major English language sites which Russian web-users have come to rely on.  The best news, from an advertising point of view is that Yahoo!’s users are wealthy, with more than 18% of them earning at least $2,000 per month.  What’s just as interesting is just how popular the English language is for undertaking searches, with more than three quarters of all searches being carried out in English.  The top five non-Russian sites which they use include Wikipedia, MSN and of course LiveJournal!  But their familiarity with English only goes so far, nearly 75% of all surverys were completed in Russian.

Edward Shenderovich, SUP's Strategy Director, took a part in a panel on the Russian advertising market organized by Troika Dialog, also known as the company behind the "Russia Forum" (http://www.therussiaforum.com/). The panel's title was very straightforward: “Reaching Russians: Advertising”.  

For a little over an hour, movers and shakers of the Russian media and advertising space, including Sergey Vasiliev of Video International and Ella Stewart of BBDO Russia,  talked about growth opportunities, trends and peculiarities of the Russian market.

There was an active discussion on the constraints which the industry faces:  broadband infrastructure, the fact that a “Russian consumer can eat only so many Mars bars,” and the lack of reliable postal service.  Demyan Kudryavstev of “Kommersant” pointed out that Russia has always had the problem of “fools and roads,” which is now referred to as the problem of “management and infrastructure.”

Last Friday SUP's president Andrew Paulson took a part in the online conference and answered the questions posted by the readers of Sostav.ru website.

Paulson talked about his arrival to Moscow, the end of his career as a professional photographer and establishment of Afisha Publishing House. He explained why you don't need a lot of money to start your own business, the importance of research for advertising, what is the formula of Afisha and SUP's success, why it is practically impossible to manage SUP's employees and shared his opinions of the prospects of LiveJournal's development in Russia and abroad as well as on a number of other interesting issues.

You can read all the answers here: "Andrew Paulson: the first in the Silicon Valley".