Internet in Russian
# Internet in Russian

Internet in Russian (also Russian Internet (Russian: русский Интернет), known as Runet) is a part of the Internet that uses the Russian language. Geographically, it reaches all continents, including Antarctica (Russian scientists on Bellingshausen Station), but mostly it is based in Russia.

According to reports conducted by Yandex, Russian is the primary language of 91% of Russian websites (in Yandex's list). In the autumn of 2009, Runet contained about 15 million sites (estimated to be about 6.5% of the entire Internet).

Domains with a high proportion of the Russian language include .su, .ru, .рф, .ua, .by, .kz.

Russian is used on 89.8% of .ru sites and on 88.7% of the former Soviet Union domain, .su. Russian is the most used language of websites of several countries that were part of the former Soviet Union: 79.0% in Ukraine, 86.9% in Belarus, 84.0% in Kazakhstan, 79.6% in Uzbekistan, 75.9% in Kyrgyzstan, and 81.8% in Tajikistan.

## Statistics

As of 2013, the 59.7 million Russian-speaking Internet users, represented 3% of global Internet users. In April 2012, Russia was ranked 9th in the world for number of users and 4th (with 4.8%) for number of Russian-language content.

In September 2011, Russia surpassed Germany as the biggest Internet market in Europe, with 50.8 million users.

In March 2013, it was announced that Russian is the second most used language on the web.

## Research

Harvard University's Berkman Center conducts regular research of the Russian-language Web, identified by Cyrillic encoding. In particular, there are papers named "Mapping Russian Twitter", "Mapping RuNet Politics and Mobilization" and "RuNet Echo". There are Russian internet-reviewing newspapers called TheRunet, Runetologia and others.

