Women catch up with men in Belarus internet
Fiodar Karalenka, the project coordinator for akavita.by, says that Web 2.0-based projects boosted up the most this year. But the Belarusian users visit several resources only before going to the other segments of the internet to search or check e-mails.
“The quality Belarusian resources are there, but they are very few. If anyone wants to get some information about a certain country, he or she would go visit a non-Belarusian site,” he said.
According to Fiodar’s research, the most popular sites are those associated with mobile phones, e-shops and also news and IT. Whatever is popular in Russia will get ground here as well.
In the view of Kiryl Valoshyn, the director of the biggest Belarusian web portal tut.by, visitors are interested the most in searches, news and e-mail.
“Job opportunities category is very popular with 8000-9000 people visiting it daily. Besides, we normally have 4000 people visiting the Classified Ads category.
The large By-net catalogues list over 30,000 sites. Earlier, you could count the most interesting ones with your five fingers. Today, there are thousands of quality resources, according to bybanner.com expert, Aliaksej Shablinski.
“Tut.by, kosht.by, olen.by, onliner.by…Users are mainly interested in news and shopping. Users have become more experienced. They feel confident and enjoy using different services,” he said.
“By-net is transforming quantity into quality. Many old sites ate being upgraded. Factories launch their own web sites. It is very seldom to hear that a plant manager names electronic mail in respond to a question about the internet site,” notes Yury Cyganok, a einfo.by expert.
The portrait of an internet user resembles the portrait of an average Belarusian. There are presently 10 percent of programmers in the internet against 19 percent two years ago. Male users accounted for 83 percent of visitors in 2000. In 2006, there were 48 percent of women and 52 percent of men.
