08/31/2000
The Wall Street Journal
Page A17
(Copyright (c) 2000, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

MOSCOW -- The fire at a Moscow television tower that knocked Russia's main state-run channels off the air has proved a bonanza for the Internet, as online media step in to fill the information void. Faced with the blackout, some news junkies switched on the radio and others bought satellite dishes. But thousands surfed online media, creating a surge in popularity unprecedented in the brief history of the Russian Internet.

"People have seen that whatever goes wrong in Russia -- and lots can go wrong -- the Internet will always work," says Sergei Shkarupa, head of RosBusinessConsulting .ru, the nation's second most popular Web site.

TV-loving Muscovites have been in shock since Sunday's fire at the 1,772-foot Ostankino tower, which killed three people and shut down transmission of all state-run channels in the capital. For several days, the only channel operating normally there was TNT, an affiliate of NTV. The country's largest private television network, NTV is owned by Vladimir Gusinsky, a media magnate and foe of President Vladimir Putin.

Mr. Putin has ordered state-run broadcasts to resume within a week; state broadcasters RTR and ORT resumed limited programming last night.

Thanks to the fire, popular news sites have acquired a new generation of users. RosBusiness, a financial wire, said it had six million visitors to its site Monday -- six times its usual daily traffic. "We had to switch off all the search engines and simplify our graphics, otherwise the server would have crashed," says RosBusiness's Mr. Shkarupa. Online newspaper Lenta.ru said it had 63,500 visitors on Monday -- twice the usual number. The Web sites of all the country's TV stations -- state-owned and private -- have drawn heavier traffic since the tower fire.

Internet analysts say there was a drift toward Web-based media before the Ostankino fire. They say interest soared throughout August, fueled by disasters such as an explosion in Moscow's Pushkin Square and the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine. RosBusiness says its audience grew by 15% after the Pushkin Square bomb.

Analysts say many people turned to the Internet after despairing of the state-run media's coverage of the Kursk disaster, which loyally reported the official version of events even when it was revealed as wholly inaccurate.

"People like the Internet because it's independent, unbiased and uses lots of sources -- and this at a time when the government is trying to control the flow of news and channel it exclusively through state-run TV," says Anton Nosik, editor-in-chief of Lenta.ru.

NTV Plus says its phones have been jammed since the Ostankino fire. The company says it sold 1,300 satellite dishes Monday at $234 each -- on a normal day it sells 50. "It's just crazy here, like in wartime," spokeswoman Marina Levashova says. "We got 18,000 inquiries at our call center on Monday morning alone. The interest is enormous."

Industry insiders hope raised awareness of the Net will boost online advertizing. Only $2 million of Russia's $650 million in ad spending went to the Internet last year. That figure is expected to grow to $59 million in 2003, Moscow investment bank Brunswick UBS Warburg says.