comScore: Russians Spend More Time On Social Networks Than The Rest Of World
To put that level of ‘engagement’ in perspective: the average world-wide is 3.7 hours and 525 pages per visitor. Among the 40 individual countries reported by comScore, Brazil ranked closest to Russia at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours). The United States is ranked number 9, with 4.2 hours and 477 pages per visitor per month.
According to comScore, 65 percent of the worldwide Internet audience engages in social networking activities. More precisely, of the 1.1 billion people age 15 and older worldwide who accessed the Internet from a home or work location in May 2009, 734.2 million visited at least one social networking site during the month.
Also noteworthy: local social networks are much more popular with Russians than international websites. The most popular of these sites was Vkontakte.ru with 14.3 million visitors, followed by Odnoklassniki.ru (7.8 million visitors), Mail.ru – My World (6.3 million visitors) and Fotostrana.ru (1.6 million visitors). Facebook is the first international service to be ranked in the list of most popular social networks – it attracted 616,000 Russian visitors in May 2009 (up 277 percent compared to May 2008).
One caveat, though: the comScore study does not count traffic from public computers (e.g. Internet cafes) nor does it measure traffic coming from mobile devices.