Teens are More Active in Everything Online in Russia, Expect a Boom

We all use the World Wide Web in a different manner depending on our interests but there are some tools that depend on our age, occupation and location. Since today all the schoolchildren and students in Russia go back to school, all the news reports are more or less focused on children. Yesterday a company that deals with measuring Russian internet audience published results of an interesting survey of Russian schoolchildren and students that is focused on their use of the internet tools.

While in the US the main question these days seems to be why teens are hesitant to use Twitter, here we are definitely not that advanced and Twitter has not even approached mainstream popularity in the country. Of course that does not mean you won’t find any students in the country who already know what Twitter is and even use the microblogging tool but these students will usually belong to some of the geekier IT faculties while the rest of them will mostly use simpler and more traditional tools helping them in education and in entertainment.

The most important result of the study is that it proves that teens are actually way more active in their use of the internet than the rest of the population: 43 to 59 per cent of teens (depending on where they study) go online every day while for the entire Russian internet population it is only 23 per cent.

In general, the younger representatives of the internet population are more active than the rest of us in not only how frequently they do it but in their more advanced activities as well: teens are more likely to download and listen to audio files online (63-64% versus 47% for the entire audience), to download and watch video (51-52% versus 42%) and to do many other things that older adults who mainly use the internet for business are not that passionate about.

It is no surprise that schoolchildren are more attracted to entertainment resources than students who seem to focus on their education and career much more: where schoolchildren prefer online gaming (as many as 45% of them versus 26% of students and 25% of all the internet users), students use online recruitment tools even heavier than an average web user: 24% use the WWW to look for a job while this figure is only 16% for the entire web audience.

When it comes to communications, an interesting revelation here is that the teens are obviously very active with all the communication tools as well: email is used by 60% of students and 25% of schoolchildren while social networks are used for communication by as many as 44% of schoolchildren and more than a half of all students (53%).

All in all, it is obvious that in general the younger population of Russia is more active online in just about everything and they quickly learn to embrace all the tools and services available. And while the teens are already active online and the entire Russian audience is growing rapidly anyway, I’d expect a real boom when teens who go back to school, colleges and universities today graduate and begin working, some of them online, – I can only imagine what type of rapid development they will introduce to the Russian segment of the internet given how active they are in their early age of learning.

Via (in Russian), photo credit