It is not necessary to discuss how much the war changed Armenian society in terms of media consumption. During the days of the war, in the weeks following the ceasefire, the audiences of the media and active social network accounts increased several times. However, the statistics of more recent days show that society is tired of the news, the involvement in some sectors is now lower than in the pre-war days.

In the first part of December 2020, people were still actively following the events. And already at the end of the year, the decline of interest began. Which is logical even in the current difficult conditions: On the eve of the new year there is always a decline in media visits and this year was no exception.

But the interesting thing is that after the holidays we continue to see a decline in interest.

This is the full Armenian internet traffic calculated by Cloudflare, which shows that there is a decline in one day, and there is no other tendency towards recovery.

As an example, let me bring a schedule of visits to two Armenian news websites, which shows that the number of visitors at the moment is lower than before the war. (I do not write the names of the media, but such a tendency is typical for the moment. Exceptions are the sites that during the war seriously expanded their audience and due to this have an objective increase in visits).

A similar picture is also seen in the area of Telegram channels. Let me bring two examples again, without mentioning the names of the channels.

And against this background, we see that TikTok and Likee are again among the fastest-growing platforms in Armenia. It seems that people do not want to be silent readers of the political struggle and run to more “light” content.

Samvel Martirosyan

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