In the age of social networks, readers of Armenian content online have their specific, and, conversely, very general features. 

A specific situation has been created in Armenia today, where playing a dominant role is Facebook, which not only is the most active social network after [popular Russian-language social networking site] Odnoklassniki, but also is becoming the main platform for media. The reader in Armenia today is sitting in Facebook and waiting to see what good articles he’ll come across to go and read.  

Not revealing any specific names, let’s cite some statistics from several Armenian news websites. A significant portion of their visitors come from one place — Facebook. The most conservative figure varies from approximately a rate of 20%, with the highest, up to 65%. 

In order to understand the difference as compared to other countries, even from Facebook’s supernatural growth, the press in Europe, for example, gets 5–15% of its traffic from this social networking site. 

For example, according to findings by comScore, Facebook’s growth in amassing an audience in the course of a year was unprecedented, but not as much as it could be in Armenia.

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What is this due to? It’s hard to say, but there are a few circumstances.

Online news media is just getting established in Armenia. Furthermore, there is a constant increase in the number of online news sites. On the other hand, the number of Internet users is constantly and quickly growing. Under such conditions, permanent readers as a layer of society haven’t been amassed. Naturally, the majority of readers don’t have a preferred news source and are waiting to see what interesting gem might appear in Facebook.

Several obstacles tied to the Armenian language online resulted in not establishing our own search engine, while international systems didn’t provide full opportunities for developing the Armenian. For example, major search engines don’t have the option of searching Armenian news feeds — I’m referring to Google News, Yandex News and so on. For this reason, people in Armenia don’t search for news; rather, they wait to see what will come up in Facebook.

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As a consequence, we get quite a “lazy” audience which is found under the influence of Facebook’s small mass of active users. But this is already a different conversation. 

Samvel Martirosyan

P.S. Of course, large-scale and various studies are needed to really seriously understand the Armenian online audience. As these don’t yet exist, we tried to get the picture through primitive methods. 

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