Internet stats, made to excite!

I got sent this press release yesterday by comScore. It highlights the Russians are getting into Social Media, in a massive way. In fact according to the statistics Russians are spending more than 9 hours per month on social networking sites, that is double the worldwide average of 4.5 hours!
What content are they producing to keep them online? What/how are they sharing?
What does it mean to a company, how can they leverage this? What opportuities are there in the Russian market? I was asking myself all of this too.
Surely we must be able to learn something from the sites they're engaging on, right?
But then I remembered what I'd learnt from an athlete I've been working with the past year, Tristan Miller at RunLikeCrazy.com

"The internet is rubbish over here"

I've heard this really often from him, I couldn't remember if it was Russia, but I had heard it really frequently so I checked it out. Lo and behold it was Russia with 10% of the poulation having access to broardband it means less thana quarter of the 40 million users have access to high speed internet. The fastest possible speeds you can get out of dial up is 56.6kb per second, which is slooooooooow, could go some ways to explaining the amount of extra time spent online?
Also, other questions remain;
- Is it dedicated time online?
- What are they using it for?


I don't doubt the accuracy of these statistics but my point is there are a lot of statistics out there, until you look at social, economical/infrastructure factors, its hard to determine how valid the findings are to your business.

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