What are the most popular Internet sites in Ukraine? Who goes online regularly in this part of the world?
These are absorbing questions for Internet professionals, investors and entrepreneurs – but finding answers can be tricky.
One way might be to look into the ratings compiled by the Ukrainian sites that monitor Ukrainians' Web habits – Odessa-based hit counter Ping (http://www.topping.com.ua) and Kyiv-based Alpha Counter (http://www.a-counter.kiev.ua) serve as good references for Web users.
But standard hit counters can have drawbacks – namely they don't count time online and they often fail to distinguish among individual users.
Traditional surverys can provide information that the hit counters can't.
Ad agency Real Media Ukraine hired MMI Ukraine, a daughter company of Consulting Ukraine Group, to survey Internet usage in Kyiv. In a telephone poll conducted March 15 to April 1 among 11,580 Kyivans, the company found some useful data that the hit counters won't tell you.
The survey found that business and educational Web sites are about as popular as chat and game sites among Kyivans. It found that 30.6 percent of Internet users surf the Net in quest of news, while 30.7 percent pursue educational goals online.
But for Ukraine's online community, it's not all work and no play. Out of the 16 sites MMI Ukraine quizzed respondents on, the most popular site was http://www.galaradio.com. At any given time, galaradio.com is also usually among the top-three sites according to the hit counters, as well. Galaradio.com draws young people in the main – 61 percent of its visitors are aged 16 to 24.
Many of those visitors are heading to Gala's chat room. According to the poll, Gala chat is by far the most popular chat site in Ukraine.
'Roughly speaking, online communication in a chatroom is a priority for 15 percent of Internet users in Ukraine,' said Yury Nazarov, spokesperson at the search engine Meta Ukraine.
Job sites are also popular draws. In Kyiv, kiev-job.hypermart.net is the most popular job site and among the most popular sites overall. In April, the site attracted around 80,000 unique hosts (individual surfers) due to the regular updating of its extensive job-list. Each month 3,500 new announcements are available to the public free of charge.
Special-interest sites are also popular. Take the site run by Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, at www.rada.kiev.ua. The site pulls in a steady flow of unique hosts every day, and includes a library of 60,900 documents, including laws and regulations passed since 1990, as well as some legal documents that have been in use since Soviet times.
The text of the Constitution of Ukraine in English is also available on parliament's site.
As to the demographic characteristics of the capital's Internet users, Kyiv females turn out to be better represented than is usual in online populations elsewhere. Ukrainian women constitute around one-third of Internet users, which is about two times more than the average in online communities worldwide.
Still, Web sites that target women have yet to make much of an impact. A recent glance at the Ukrainian Web counters showed no women's sites among the top 20.
In Russia, the most popular women's site is Zhenski Strasti, an online Russian magazine for women (passion.ru). It often sneaks into the lower half of the top 20 on the Russian Web counter Rambler Top 100 (www.rambler.ru).
