This week comScore released a study on the most popular internet properties across Europe. As you would expect, Google is the most popular destination in 13 of the 16 countries surveyed.
However the results show that Google has made less progress in Russia than other statistics would indicate. Yandex was rated first, then Mail.ru followed by Rambler in third place. While other statistics show that Google is holding second place in terms of traffic, as a destination they failed to make the top three.
In fact, Russia was the only country surveyed where none of the Western search engines made an appearance.
It is worth noting though that comScore may have made a mistake in their estimate of the total volume of Russian traffic. They suggest there are a total of 5m unique monthly visitors in Russia, when FOM reports this figure should be over 24m (10m per day). Yandex on their own report 5m unique visitors per day which would give weight to the FOM statistics.
This survey gives new importance to the position of Mail.ru as a destination site in Russia. It would appear that their decision to replace Google with Yandex as a source of contextual advertising in 2006 was more significant than traffic figures suggested.
Nick Wilsdon
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