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17.05.2012

THE IMAGE OF THE INTERNET USER IN ARMENIA

   

Samvel Martirosyan
Expert at the Center for Information Studies, “Noravank” Foundation

General Statistics

A number of the Internet users in Armenia have risen sharply for the recent three years. According to the latest data, for June 2011 Internet is available to 796550 people, i.e. 47.1% of 2 million 967 thousand population of Armenia. According to IntetnetWorldStats international organization, this is the highest availability rate for the CIS countries1. The number of the users has obviously risen over the past six months.

In February 2012 the daily page traffic of the Armenian web sites registered in Circle.am system was 1.25-1.35 million people, 58% of which were the users from Armenia2. The page traffic of the information web sites over the same period constituted about a half of the entire page traffic of the Armenian Internet – 680-750 thousand people per day, 57% of which were the users from Armenia3. This comes to prove the interest of the users from Armenia in political and public subjects.

If we consider interest in non-Armenian web sites, here the most visited sites are the social networks, search engines and online resources. According to Alexa.com the most visited web sites by the users from Armenia in February were Facebook.com, Youtube.com and Google.com4.

The sites most visited by the users from Armenia (according to Alexa.com)

1. Facebook.com
2. Youtube.com
3. Google.com
4. Google.am
5. Odnoklassniki.ru
6. Mail.ru
7. Google.ru
8. Wikipedia.org
9. Yandex.ru
10. Yahoo.com

What do the users from Armenia search on the web?

According to the most popular in Armenia search engine – Google – top searches for the users from Armenia are as follows.

The main search terms used in 2011 show that the users give preference to social networks, movies and music. Besides two mass media appeared among the top searches (Pic. 1).

As for the first two months of 2012 the situation did not particularly change (Pic. 2). It can only be noticed that the tendency of downloading materials from the Internet has increased, which is, most probably, conditioned by both increasing of the average speed of the Internet connection and spreading tendency of downloading various films from the Internet.

Pic. 1
Top searches of the users from Armenia for 2011 (according to Google.com)

The statistical picture of the Internet users from Armenia has not been seriously studied yet. Though the search engines and rating systems allow getting some idea, nevertheless, a deeper study demands broader and more detailed research, which would include combination of both technical and sociological methods. However, no such study has been carried out in Armenia yet.

Pic. 2
Top searched terms by the users from Armenia for 2012 (according to Google.com)

1 http://www.panorama.am/am/IT/2012/02/10/inet/.

2 http://www.circle.am/?go=catinfo&cat=onelist.

3 http://www.circle.am/?go=catinfo&cat=news.

4 It should be mentioned that such statistics do not include the visits to the porn sites, which are the most visited all over the world. Armenia is not exclusion either. Moreover, according to Google term “porno” is most searched by the users from Armenia as compared to the mass of other terms searched. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=porno&cmpt=q.

“Globus” analytical journal, # 5, 2012

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