"Delovoy Peterburg" (St. Petersburg), March 26, 2003 - No. 051. - P. 18

The war on Iraq has again increased the number of visitors of news sites on the Internet. The Internet, initially designed as a military communications network, enables all its users throughout the world to keep up with current events.

This time, news sites of the Russian part of the Internet (runet) endured a stream of visitors. The situation of the past years when the net did not cope with the rocketed hit rate has not repeated. Apparently it is about the technical streamlining, undergone by the majority of popular Internet sites after those troubles.

According to Rambler's statistics, the leaders of the Mass Media and Periodicals section (hit 100), which occasionally exchange their places, are the RBC, Lenta.ru, Dni.ru, and Gazeta.ru sites. Traditionally the peak of the number of visitors is in the morning hours, the maximum reached from 10 a.m. till 12 a.m. - 1 p.m. Over this period, the hit rate at RBC, for example, exceeds 100,000-120,000 visitors (leads from 10 p.m. to 1 p.m.). The first ten sites of Rambler's Top 100 enjoy 25,000 to 100,000 visitors.

On average, the Iraqi war has doubled the hit rate of news sites. However, this time there were no sharp upsurges in the hit rate, when the number of visitors would rocket by 5 to 6 times to 1 million.

The 1998 crisis

Any considerable offline event would usually influence the hit rate at Internet mass media. For Russia, the most significant event of the Internet epoch was the 1998 crisis. One of the leading information sites, RosBusinessConsulting (RBC), informally has counted off its history since August 17, 1998. The crisis in the country attracted about 100,000 people to up-to-date information. The agency could not give a more precise figure: the site was not ready for such a pandemonium and simply collapsed (see "Delovoy Peterburg" No.133/2000, www.dp.ru). Other currently popular Internet mass media were not operating at that time; it was foreign Internet sites that were loaded most of all.

August 2000

August 2000 became a more considerable landmark for the Internet. According to Mikhail Khanov, the Marketing Director of OAO Rambler Internet Holding (see "Delovoy Peterburg" No.133/2000, www.dp.ru), the popularity of the Rambler.ru news sites increased over less than one month. On August 7, 2000, the average daily hit rate of news at Rambler.ru did not overcome 18,000 visitors, while on August 20 it exceeded 145,000.

Rambler's statistics shows that the hit rate of news sites on the "black" Monday in the life of the Ostankino TV center overcame average figures by 2 to 4 times. According to statistics, such "prolonged" stories as presidential elections or the Kursk sub tragedy influence Internet users more than newspaper readers. For example, RosBusinessConsulting reached its record level throughout its operations (280,000 visitors) on March 27, 2000, during the counting of votes at presidential elections. Kursk brought about 1 million visitors to RBC.

Oleg Shiryayev