The Minister of Digital Development Maksut Shadayev spoke about the structural changes in mobile traffic in Runet at SPIEF 2022. According to Shadayev, YouTube has remained the leader in terms of traffic in recent months. YouTube accounts for 18% of the internet traffic of the ‘big four’ operators.

VKontakte social network was ranked second among all services in Runet — the traffic increased by more than a third, exceeding 10%.

In the first two months of this year, TikTok accounted for more than 12% of traffic, but recently the traffic volume has fallen below 10%, Shadayev notes. The traffic of Facebook, Instagram (owned by Meta, which was declared extremist and banned in Russia) and Twitter amounted to about 10-12%. At the same time, the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media reports that blocked networks managed to save only about 20% of the previous traffic amount with the help of VPN. “We see that blocked social networks managed to keep only a fifth of the traffic with the help of VPN. We can say that only every fifth user continued to use blocked social networks using VPN services,” Shadayev said.

In addition, the minister mentioned a significant increase in the data flow in Telegram — its share in all mobile traffic has more than doubled, and currently it is above 6%. WhatsApp demonstrates stability, maintaining less than 2%.

Original in Russian