2012.02.02,

Critique

Who Reads Us Online? We Don’t Know

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Samvel Martirosyan
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Media researcher

The Internet is growing in Armenia — and growing at the same speed is our ignorance about internet users. Who in Armenia goes online, what do they read, and where do they go? And several dozens of other questions that are important to understand the online news audience.

We likewise vaguely know how many people use an internet connection in Armenia: about one third of the population or perhaps about 10% more. We approximately know that the popular Russian-language social networking site Odnoklassniki has more than 600,000 visits from Armenia. We know that there were about 260,000 active users in Armenia on Facebook in January. The Armenian web resources rating site Circle.am shows us that, for example, the number of (online) visits tripled in Sept. 2011 as compared to Sept. 2010. Internet in Armenia

But all this tells us very little. Behind these figures lie very dry statistics. We, for example, don’t know which portion of middle-aged readers migrated from the print press to online media. 

And the answers to such questions are important. Otherwise, we have a situation where some sites use very ugly methods to raise their ratings and the number of visits to their site. In such cases, a dozen thousand fake readers emerge in the Armenian web, and in many cases it’s nearly impossible to “catch” them, if you track purely technical calculations. 

For these reasons, disputes arise, the most vivid example of which is the public disagreement between A1+ and Circle.am. The Armenian web is measured purely in terms of numbers (the number of visits), which Circle.am has succeeded in doing for years, as a result of which the system has become a nationwide rating platform. 

However, Circle.am shouldn’t be the industry’s only “investigator,” since in this case, the data objectively becomes one-sided.

The lack of public studies transforms the Armenian web into an impersonal arithmetical field, as a consequence of which the Armenian news media field also finds itself in the same condition — if we consider that today, online media yields its influence perhaps only to television.

This last sentence might cause disagreement, but the issue is we don’t know the right answer, since our online news media hasn’t been studied. And as long as it’s not examined, whoever wants can say whatever he wants and you can easily accuse whoever you want.

Samvel Martirosyan
Infographic from the Armenian government’s official website

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


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