Highlights of web technology surveys, June 2011: The Runet is growing quickly. And it's different.

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 1 June 2011 in News, Content Languages

Today, the Russian language is used by 4.6% of all websites. That is up from 3.6% one year ago. Russian is the language #4 on the web behind English, German and Japanese. If the current trends continue, it will become #3 before the end of the year.

The Runet is not only Russia

The top level domain segmentation report for Russian shows that outside Russia the language is primarily used by websites from the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and even .su, the top level domain from the former Soviet Union, is still used by 0.1% of all websites. Other countries where Russian is spoken, such as Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, are too small to have a big presence in that report.

The Runet is different

If we look at the technologies used by site in Russian, we see the the Runet is different.

The "big 3" Content Management Systems (WordPress, Joomla and Drupal) and used a lot also in the Runet, but the Russian alternatives are very well respresentend: DataLife Engine is #3 and Bitrix is #4 with over 10% market share each, and also uCoz and NetCat are in the top 10 in that market.

PHP is the most popular server-side language world-wide, but in the Runet is has almost a monopoly with well over 90% market share.

Similarly, Unix dominates the operating system market for websites, leaving only 11% for Windows.

The character encoding used by the Russian sites is primarily Windows-1251, designed specifically to cover the Cyrillic alphabet. Against the global trend UTF-8 is used by only 43%.

The web server segmentation report shows the best known example of Russian web technology: Nginx is head to head with Apache in that statistics. If we take only the sites from Russia, Nginx is already leading.

Russians love their web counters. That shows in the traffic analysis segmentation report, where LiveInternet has more users that Google Analytics, and two more local services, Rambler and Yandex.Metrika, are also very well represented.

When it comes to advertising, the Runet embraces Google like the rest of the world, but even more: Google AdSense is the dominating advertising network with over 92% market share, compared to 79% world-wide.

Local is beautiful

Examining the Runet as an example of a growing local internet market shows that despite the increasing globalization of our economies, and despite the seemingly border-less nature of the web, local services and technologies can still be quite successful. That is nice.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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