Russian Social Media Users Write 30 Million Daily Posts · Global Voices
Kevin Rothrock

Russians tweet, post, and blog 30 million items a day. Nearly everybody's doing it. Image edited by Kevin Rothrock.
According to a new study, Russian social media users pump about 30 million new posts into the digital ether every day. Igor Ashmanov, creator of Kibirum (a research firm that specializes in analyzing social media and managing online reputations), announced his company's findings at a marketing conference in Moscow earlier this month.
In addition to gauging social media activity across the RuNet, Kibirum‘s study focused on Russia's most active social networks: Facebook, VKontakte, Twitter, LiveJournal, and Instagram. According to the research, there are 3 million active Facebook users in Russia writing 4-5 million daily posts. There are 1.5-2 million Russian Twitter users, who tweet 8-12 million times a day. Instagram users share more than 2 million photos every day, and there are more than 14 million registered LiveJournal accounts.
Russia's most popular online network, VKontakte, publishes 12 million daily posts from users who are generally the youngest of any major social media website. On average, the oldest users belong to the Russian website Odnoklassniki.
Kibirum‘s study also counted about 12,000 online news sites and more than 120,000 standalone blogs and Internet forums.
For all the people registered on these websites and the large number of posts, Kibirum found that only 5 percent of users actually create original content. (The vast majority of Web activity is reposting someone else's material.)
Efforts to calculate and label the RuNet's bloggers and digital media could become a major feature of future Internet regulations. The so-called “Law on Bloggers” that took effect in August 2014, as well as a more recent legislative initiative from Duma deputy Alexey Kazakov to equate unambiguously bloggers and journalists, will likely spur more efforts to quantify and identify the Russians producing and sharing content online.