Internet in Russia and Ukraine – Part 1. General Information and Statistics – Email Marketing
Internet in Russia and Ukraine - Part 1. General Information and Statistics
Vyacheslav Melnik
User Base
The non-US and non-English Web segments have been boosted by a growing trend towards PC penetration and cheaper Internet access in the last couple of years. The US share of the global population online, once above ninety percent, is now under a quarter, while the number of Internet users who do not speak English at all continues to grow.
The Asia-Pacific region remains a key contributor to the increase in the number of non-English speakers on the Web, but the Russian Internet, aka Runet, demonstrates the accelerated pace of development as well.
The Russian language on the Web was represented by 2.7 percent in March 2003, said Global Reach http://www.global-reach.biz/globstats/index.php3, a consultancy that tracks non-English online populations. The share is quite minor, compared to English with its 35.2 percent. However, the growth rate of Runet is far more exciting; the Russian Internet audience has tripled over the last two years, registering a 40 percent increase annually. The February 2003 Report by SpyLOG http://gs.spylog.ru/interesting.phtmlid=51%20 indicates that the total users who surf the Russian portion of the Internet have reached about 15 million, 60 percent of whom live in Russia and seven percent in Ukraine. Moscow and St.-Petersburg account for 53 percent of the total Internet users in Russia. Similarly, the Ukrainian Internet surveys reveal that the vast majority 70 percent of Ukrainian users live in Kiev, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov and Donetsk, according to freenet.kiev.ua and mct.kiev.ua as quoted in Kyiv Post Business March 20, 2003.
The Ukrainian user base grows as fast as its Russian counterpart. The total Internet users in Ukraine reached 2.5 million by year-end 2002, a 150 percent increase in a year, said the head of the Ukrainian State Committee for Communications and Information Technologies http://mignews.com.ua/events/ukraine/73927.html. Independent marketers confirm the recent trends on the Ukrainian Internet, or Uanet for short. For example, eRus.ru http://www.e-rus.ru/news/2003/03/251511_3939.shtml quoted GfK-USM, a marketing company, as stating that the regular Internet users in Ukraine accounted for 6.4 percent of the total population 3.1 million of 48.4 million in February 2003, and the number of the users who purchased products or services through the Internet was doubled when compared to February 2002.
Internet Access and Prices
Dial-up connection is the most common way of accessing the Internet in both Russia and Ukraine. The Ukrainian dial-up users, for example, pay $0.1 to $2.0 an hour for Internet access, depending on an ISP, time of day and availability of callback services. The monthly charge for unmetered access in Kiev currently ranges from about $4 midnight to 9.00 a.m. with no callback support to about $40 24-hour access via callback service. The callback service in Kiev will save you about $0.4/hour, an additional fee charged by Ukrtelecom for connection to the local telephone line.
The broadband access is rather expensive, ranging from $40/month IDSN, 64 K/s, 1 GB monthly data transfer to $300/month dedicated line, 64-128 K/s, unlimited transfer with a set-up fee of $200 to 300, plus some hidden charges that are quite common for the local providers. Thus, only corporate clients can enjoy the privilege of broadband subscription.
What Users are Searching for
Like Internet users worldwide, the majority of Russian and Ukrainian surfers search the Web for information. A Yandex poll http://www.yandex.ru/polling/9.html shows that about 24 percent searchers use the Web for easy reference and over 15 percent use it as a research tool. A further 12 percent of those polled said the Internet was a news source for them while only 14 percent preferred online entertainment services. An increase in personal consumption in Russia and Ukraine has made a positive impact on the regional Internet. Russians and Ukrainian are increasingly relying on the Internet in order to evaluate products or services before they make their final decision to buy, whether online or offline. Currently, about 1200 online shops are listed in Magazin.ru, the largest Russian e-commerce catalogue, while CNews.ru http://www.cnews.ru/reviews/online/ reported last year that the total number of operational online shops in Runet was 500 at the beginning of 2002. The most e-shops are online outlets of bricks-and-mortar businesses, but some "pure" online stores have opened their virtual doors as well. Most notable are bookstores such as Ozon, Biblio Globus and Books in Russia, and Bookshop, AzBooKa and Bambook in Ukraine. Despite a certain lack of high-quality online offerings in Runet and Uanet, surprisingly few Western sites offer the products and services that need no customs clearance. For example, web hosting fees in Ukraine are about two to eight times higher than those somewhere in the United States, but the service providers abroad seem to be in no hurry to enter the local market. This is also true for e-books, especially on programming and computing.
Spam and Spamdexing
Despite spam is still flourishing on the Russian Web, unsolicited email messages in Runet are far less aggressive than the email marketing campaigns in the US, when a news subscriber may receive bundles of advert mailings that are vaguely associated with his/her initial subscription.
The more pressing issue for both users and search engines is spamdexing, i.e. unfair tricks aimed at attaining high rankings in search engines. Searching Runet for a particular key phrase can give you dozens of mirrors and doorways. Some successful SE optimizers in Russia and Ukraine openly advertise that their promotion techniques are solely based on building doorways or cloaking, which currently seems unwise on the global Internet.
The top Russian search engines fight against spam in much as the most popular search engines do worldwide. For example, Yandex and Rambler penalize websites for using unfair tricks and encourage Runet users to report search engine spam. Many professional programmers and webmasters also voice their concerns about spamdexing. Articles by A. Shkondin at ClubPro.spb.ru http://clubpro.spb.ru/ provide some classic examples of how spammers play games with the Russian search engines and Internet surfers.
About The Author
Vyacheslav Melnik is the founder and owner of AzureL10n http://azurel10n.com/, a website specializing in web localization, copywriting and search engine optimization for Runet and Uanet, the Russian and Ukrainian portions of the Internet.
vm@azurel10n.com
Actually Working to Make Money on the Internet – Domain Name
Actually Working to Make Money on the Internet
Danny Schartkoff
There are many people out desperate for more money. Unfortunatly, most of them are desperate for a lot of money very fast. Thousands of internet sites prey on these people. In fact, these sites are around because their owners also want to get rich quick. A good example of some of the scam sites are the "get paid to..." sites. According to these you can get paid to take surveys, read e-mails, surf the internet, or just about anything where they can cram your computer full of ads and pay you 1/1000 of a cent for each one.
Just think about this... if you knew how to make money without working hard or for a long time would you really want to tell other people your secret I doubt it. Trying to profit through the internet is not a free ticket. You need to learn to do things on your own and work for success.
Probably the simplist way to make money on the internet is to sell a product. However, before you can do this you need a domain name, a host and a product. Domain names and hosts are fairly cheap. Sites like yahoo offer hosting and domain name business services that even people with no webamster experience can easily use for little money. In contrast a product can be expensive. You will need to decide what you want to sell and then buy an inventory for the product. Buying your inventory also requires that you find a supplier. Once you find a supplier they will most likely be very helpful and want to help your new business.
After this comes promotion. Nobody will buy from you if they cant find your site. Submitting to product info to price comparison sites can get a lot of sales. If you price your product lower than every one else you will definatly get some sales. You can also promote your entire site by advertising. Advertising on the internet requires a great deal of sorting through the scam sites. Most people will waste money on bad advertising even after the work to find legitamate places to advertise. Webmaster forums can help to get through this because you can ask other webmasters what has and hasnt worked for them to avoid mistakes others have made.
Once you find a way to successfully promote your business the moeny really does often come quick and with little work.
About The Author
Danny is a college student in Wisconsin. He is a webmaster as a hobby and a student as... well a hobby. If you have an online store please submit it to our shopping directory.
http://www.kawt.com/index.phpsid=336347038&t=sub_pages&cat=2
Credit and The Internet – Web Hosting
Credit and The Internet
T.B. Collins
The internet stands as the largest open marketplace in the world today, almost every possible product or service is being sold on the internet. With such an availability of potential monetary transactions, the preferred method of payment is the credit card. This method allows instant transfer of funds from the consumer to the merchant in a secure environment, and payment can be verified immediately. But this process poses a dilemma for the potential consumer looking to shop on the internet without access to a valid major credit card due to their inability to gain credit based on their past financial history.
Having a good credit history is vital for consumers on and off the internet, because it allows them to purchase goods or services with the promise of future payment. This can also benefit the consumer by reducing the amount of the interest rate charged by lending institutions, and having good credit allows them to make major purchases such as a home or car. The need for good credit is essential to shopping on the net, where the consumer can purchase just about anything they need, from a butterfly statue to a boat or airplane, and anything in between. So the consumer that has a negative past credit history, and can