Exactly a year ago I described the situation with respect to social networking sites in Armenia. Now we can note that in the last year the major change in Armenian internet is the sharp increase in Instagram.

Odnoklassniki seems to be retreating, and we can already say that it is not Armenia’s number one social networking site. According to Liveinternet, the number of visitors to Odnoklassniki dropped in 2017, and in October, the number of visitors per day reached 692 thousand.

The number of visitors to Facebook per month from Armenia is already reaching 1 million 100 thousand — about 690 thousand users visit this social media platform from Armenia per day. That is, the number of visitors to Facebook and Odnoklassniki is almost equal. The main reason is the decrease in number of Odnoklassniki visitors from Armenia, since in the case of Facebook, the growth in the audience from Armenia in one year was just 10%.

According to Similarweb, Facebook visitors already exceed Odnoklassniki visitors. In second place is YouTube, which in Armenia is becoming an active vlogging platform. This is one of the developments in 2017, though vlogging isn’t a new phenomenon in ArmNet [Armenian Internet].

Meanwhile, a real increase in audience from Armenia was recorded in Instagram. Here, currently the number of visitors from Armenia per month reaches 430 thousand —  while per day this figure is 210 thousand. For comparison’s sake, a year ago these figures were 200 thousand and 110 thousand, respectively. That is to say, we have doubled our growth in Instagram.

It’s hard to make assessments when it comes to Twitter and VKontakte. Twitter doesn’t provide analytics on markets as small as Armenia’s. While the majority of users in Armenia, in fact, use VKontakte purely as a platform to listen to music or watch movies.

In Armenia, it isn’t becoming a major area of social networking contact, despite the quite clearly outlined youth groups having close ties with Russian-Armenian (Slavonic) University students and Russia.

Samvel Martirosyan

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.