Nezavisimaya hits the Web

The Internet does have some 1.5 million users in Russia, and the potential for taking some readers away from the mainstream media is there. That, however, skeptics say, requires a lot of fighting spirit and some deep pockets.

The online rating services have so far been showing "pure web publications," such as polit.ru and gazeta.ru, which offer same-day news and interactive features as well as databases and search engines, far ahead (each garnering some 10,000 hits a day) of existing newspaper-based sites.

Nor are there too many of the latter. And most of them, unlike the Nezavisimaya Gazeta, are not free. Moskovsky Komsomolets, a popular Moscow daily, runs a free electronic version of its printed edition, but does not have archives. Komsomolskaya Pravda and Argumenty i Fakty only have a digest of their daily printed publications. That leaves the Moscow News and Novaya Gazeta, which both have free online editions. Both, however, are weeklies.

Izvestia's online project, Russica-Izvestia, is expected to launch a revamped site in September which will carry the paper's electronic version as well as several databases. The current Russica-Izvestia is said to be profitable and have an annual turnover of $500,000. The project's masterminds are expecting turnover to double soon after the new site is launched.

The site will be constructed by the same team that launched the polit.ru online newspaper last February. Polit.ru has been breaking even for the past two months.

Russian publishers' reservations about going online are better understood when you consider potential advertising revenues-or rather the lack of them. The Regional Center of Internet Technologies (RCIT) estimated last year's entire Russian web advertising market at a mere $500,000. By comparison, the 1998 market for business information was said to be $5 million.

Even in the West, for all the buzz about Internet advertising, online commercials are hardly more than the high-tech equivalent of junk mail. A 1998 survey of 1,000 Americans by FreeRide, an Internet marketing group, found that only one percent of web surfers click on banner ads, only half the success rate of random postal marketing.

Until now, this has deterred all but a few computer companies, such as Dell and IBM, from spending much on the Internet advertising. Procter & Gamble, for instance, spent just $3 million of last year's $3 billion advertising budget on the Web.

This, some analysts say, may soon change as firms start to recognise that, if done right, the Internet offers something television does not: global reach and cheap direct sales.

The situation in Russia may change too-and not, it appears, without some prompting from Western publications. MSNBC News runs a web news page in Russian. So does the BBC. Political Capital, too, has a Russian web edition.

So if the fat cast of Western publishing do get a leg on their Russian competitors it will not because of bigger budgets, but rather by the simple virtue of being early arrivals on the market.

But what salesmen cannot do, analysts say, politics may. What Russia does have is a fast-growing Internet readership. The InfoArt agency estimates than 1.3 million Russians had access to Internet in March 1999. RCIT says the figure was somewhat higher-1.5 million (one percent of Russians).

Until the financial meltdown last August, the number of Russian web surfers had been doubling every year. This is not the case now, yet despite economic shambles, more and more Russians go online. RCIT says that 1.8 million Russians will have access to Internet by the end of 1999.

A survey RCIT conducted early this year showed that most Russian Internet users are well-educated, well-connected-and well-versed in politics. Fifty-five percent are college graduates, 15 percent are managers, and another 18 percent are college students.

Even more importantly, the study indicated, there is a sizable demand for political and business news. More than 20 percent of Russian Internet users read political news online. Another 16.7 percent read business news.

With parliamentary and presidential elections looming ahead, an online boom-sales or no sales-will come as little surprise. Newspapers' electronic versions may be less available to the general public, but they influence public opinion through regular editions since all journalists-even if no one else-read them.