Social Portrait Of Online Media Audience: Changing Trends and Preferences among Russians

The rapid spreading of the internet and virtual ways of communication actualizes the issue of compiling a sociological portrait of online mass media audience. The study examined the socio-demographic composition of online media audience in russia in the dynamics over the last ten years from 2008 to 2018.The analysis of empirical data on the main classification characteristics allowed identifying the stable trends in the changes in the internet audience and their perfermances . We found that internet users often do not use news websits directly (35 percent of the entire audience ); Most of all, they are intersted in the most agreegated overview or a specific piece of news .Every year the online media audience increasingly diffirentiates and become more diverse by sex, age, occuption and other characteristic.A significant number of internet users consists of russion residents at the age of 25 to 34 year (29 percent).The elder generation has begun to use the internet more often (21 percent), while the other two age group of the audience at the age of 12-17 years and 18-24 year the smallest ones,accounting for 10 percent and 14 percent respectively.The main comapnies that significantly affect the public mood in the country are yandex and mail.ru ;they control over 75 percent of the market. The arctile provides an assessment of consumers' readiness to perceive the on line media as the main and only source of information.