Number of Internet Users in Ukraine Grew 60% in 2006

February 20, 2007

According to statistics published at liga.net, the number of Internet users in Ukraine continued to grow rapidly in 2006, reaching 4 million 207 thousand in January 2007. A year ago the number was just 2.63 million out of a population of 47 million.

Interestingly, 58.6% of Ukraine's Internet users live in Kiev (!), followed by Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkov, Lviv, Crimea, and Zaporizhzhya, which make up another 29.5% of the audience. The rest of Ukraine's towns and cities have just 12% of Ukraine's online audience.

The uneven distribution of Internet usage reflects the centralized nature of Ukrainian society. The best opportunities and infrastructure exactly follow the order of the cities as they are listed above, with Kiev far ahead of the rest of the country.

In Kiev, more and more users are switching to high-speed dedicated lines from providers such as Volia Cable, which has 560 thousand clients in Kiev (over 20% of the population, but this number also includes cable TV users). After the recent drop in rates, as of February 2007 clients pay between $5 (for 250 Mb) and $30 USD (for 30 Gb) per month for their dedicated line. A modem and instalation adds another $30-50 to the cost (as a one-time fee).

60.3% of online searches in Ukraine are performed through Google, followed by Russian and Ukrainian search engines Yandex (14.8%), Meta (7.7%), Rambler (7.4%), Bigmir (6.6%), and others. Google now recognizes morphological variations of Russian words, but not Ukrainian (i.e. declensions and conjugations of a word are recognized as the same word).

VIEW ARCHIVED NEWS FROM 2007